What Once Was Mine
by SapSorrow
Summary: "In the aftermath of it all Thor's feet return him to this place – treacherous feet, marching him like gaolers to what is left of Loki's cell. As if he has not mourned enough - his heart must bring him here to break loudly in his chest. For no, he cannot mourn enough; nor, he suspects, should he ever stop." Now with added Ragnarok. All the major character death ever.
1. Chapter 1

**What Once Was Mine**

**1.**

In the aftermath of it all Thor's feet return him to this place – treacherous feet, marching him like gaolers to what is left of Loki's cell. As if he has not mourned enough, no less painfully for it being in silence, his heart must bring him here to break loudly in his chest. For no, he cannot mourn enough; nor, he suspects, should he ever stop.

Because he cannot share this; not with anyone. Because all that remains of Loki now lingers in these few scattered things in this ever since untouched cell.

He stands in the centre of the room like one at a graveside, fingers gently brushing broken furniture and golden trinkets as though they were hallowed objects. Here is a goblet, the wine not quite yet evaporated completely, here a book lying crookedly on the floor, spine broken like a tortured insect.

He strokes the sheets of the crumpled bed, fingers tracing the crinkles where he lay but never smoothing them; not daring to straighten out an inch lest he destroy what last of Loki might remain here. He kneels at the bedside with knees that shake with grief, his face pressing instinctively into the pillow where the ghost of his scent still tentatively lingers.

It clutches his heart and crushed the pieces to dust, and he cannot hold back the tears that never seem to stop nowadays, bringing storm clouds to every day he has survived since then. His fists ball into the sheets as if to hold close some last hint of him –

_Loki –_he thinks – it has been the only song his heart will sing or his brain remember ever since – _you were the only secret my heart could ever keep, the only dream it ever held. _

Now the dream is ash in his mouth, bitter poison on the back of his throat. _How many times must I mourn you? _he thinks – _how often can my carelessness get you killed? _He even half hopes there could be another time just to see Loki restored to him for that while.

And here he is again; the crashing grief coming down dull, heavy and inevitable – boring even as it brings him to his knees by what was once Loki's bed. In the lines of the sheets and in the ever torturing eye of memory he sees Loki's hand clutching for whatever he can cling to, fingers sinuous and strong, fisting and tense as they clench, his uncontrolled cries muting in a song of the all too distant past.

_No – _Thor cries back at the traitorous memory – _do not show me this now. Do not make me remember what was. _But that _no _is the key to pouring still more memory into the brain in an unforgiving deluge –

_"__Gods Loki –" he hears his own cries like a ghost howling in his ears, hears Loki's screams of pleasure like excited birds wheeling through the half of his mind, feels his brother's skin against his as beautiful and perfect as he was back then. He remember himself, too, as he was then – a him that is as gone now as Loki is. He remembers that arrogant young man returning from the hunt, fresh and brash, on fire from the chase and ever ready to start another, flirting showily with every girl who greets him and ignoring them all for the only one who can truly take the force of his desire._

_He hears in own footfalls in those halls, echoes in the mind, as he makes for Loki's rooms, hears the voice that was his ring out –_

_"__Loki? Loki I need you."_

_He sees him in memory as he saw him then, sometimes reading in the window seat as the light fades outside, the last red flare glowing behind him; sometimes practising his magic by the fire, sparks and spirals of light dancing from his hands. How he looks up as Thor comes in, with the flicker of a smile and an air of otherwise indifference that shatters to the winds at the first touch, first kiss. Loki crackles like the fire in his arms and there is always some hint of a battle in his seeming submission, some hint of the fight in this just as there is always that tingling hint of sex when they fight. _

Thor kneels in Loki's cell, bowed and broken by the memories that besiege him in all their tactile form and substance, the silk and sinew of that body beneath his hands, the taste of honey on Loki's lips, his breath hot on the skin, the gasps that bely his attempts at indifference. How completely Thor believed he would always be there, how unthinkable it would have been to imagine needing Loki – for anything – in any way at all – and Loki not being there to taunt and ultimately satisfy that need.

The roar that broke from him at Loki's passing still wrecks him in the echo of its wake. He had thought he would have to stop screaming eventually, thought that this would have to get better in time – instead it has simply latched onto his heart, sickening his system like a poisonous leech.

He remembers – and oh the stupid, mean memories – will they never let him rest? He reminds himself of all the points at which he failed. Reminds himself how Loki would still be here if it was not for him. How he let him die twice. How he must have failed him time and time again – _and did I complicate you? _he thinks – _did I mangle our childhood, loving you the way I did? Or was it you, brother, complicated me? Did we twist each other to the point where there was not room enough in all the nine realms for us to both exist? _It does not feel like it can be right. But nowadays nothing feels right.

He remembers – he was a tiny child, no higher than the window seat he could not reach to clamber into, though Loki, even smaller than he was, always managed. Thor never did see how he did it. That day in autumn he had wanted to go on the foot – hunt with the adults and when, after all pleading had failed, he had run determinedly after them all the way down the road leading out of the palace and towards the woods – he had not only fallen behind them all but had tripped and fallen flat across the stony path. He had sat there in the dust, knees and pride smarting, manfully succeeding in not crying only by a hair's breadth. Nobody would surely have dared speak to the petulant little prince at such a moment and so he had been startled when a gentle little hand rested on his shoulder and Loki had knelt down beside him;

"They wouldn't let me come either," he had said before Thor could shout at him for coming close to him in such a mood.

He hears Loki's voice now in his ears as though he kneels beside him still.

"Does that hurt?" Loki's little face scrunched up in a sympathetic consternation Thor would have accepted from nobody else. He shook his head, clenching his teeth, for his knees _had _hurt – even now he can half remember it.

"Here, let me," Loki had said, almost pleadingly, and Thor had let him press oak leaf and bandage to him and something else that sparkled slightly. It had felt better instantly, magically even, and Loki's face - so sweet and careful in the morning light.

"Why do you carry such rubbish?" Thor had huffed in lieu of thanks.

"You should be grateful for my rubbish," Loki had smiled, slightly smugly, to see how quickly it worked – "Now. What shall we do with the day?"

Thor had been planning to sit and sulk until the adults returned but Loki had pestered and pestered until Thor had agreed to play with him – so much so that it never once occurred to Thor that Loki was really doing this for him. They had snuck back up to the palace, pilfered food from the kitchens they had no need of pilfering and ran, whooping, back down the paths for all to know of their misdeed. They had spent the day in the woods after all, conducting their own hunt which they became sure was far more exciting than the one the adults were on – alternating who played hunter and who played prey.

Thor cannot hold back the tears he held back then; he feels weaker now than he was as a child. He weeps until the skies over Asgard crash and drench the Realm Eternal, weeps for that shy, loving child with the impish grin who had gazed at him with such worshipful adoration, weeps for his lover and brother and life and yes – for what is left of himself without him.

"The sky betrays your return to Asgard."

Thor starts at his father's voice behind him, and he turns and rises on shaking legs, wretched.

"It is good to see you back, my –" if Thor's head had been clearer he might have noticed the waver in his father's voice, but he does not – "Son. Now tell me; what in all the nine realms is it brings you here of all places?"

_x_

**Yes this fic is shaping up to be fairly tragic, though as always with my stories I can never be ****_so _****tragic that it won't get a happy ending! I just really felt after multiple re-watching of tdw that we didn't get to see Thor mourn enough after Loki died and my feeling is this has to be more bad putting together of the movie than that Thor would ****_not _****mourn. So that was the initial thought behind this, needless to say it will go in many directions some of them explicit! Watch this space! O_o**

**Also I apologise for the unoriginal title – I was watching "Tangled" and titles are not my forte! :-)**


	2. Chapter 2

**2.**

Thor looks around himself as though, in his grief, he had forgotten where he was. He sees the All-Father glance with him; surely seeing the place, it occurs to Thor, for the first time. A look Thor cannot read crosses his face and his brows knit –

"This cell –" he murmurs.

"So small," Thor finishes and his face darkens – "Is that why you never came down here? Did you not wish to see?"

"Did you do any differently?" His father shoots back – "You could no more face your blame than I could – until now."

"Do you think I do not blame myself?" Thor growls, angry now, at himself, at Odin, at everything that has happened – but at himself most of all – "Do you think there is a moment in which I am allowed to forget that if it was not for me he would still be here?"

"_Here," _Odin echoes, his face softening – "Do you really think that would have been preferable?"

"I think my brother would still have been alive," Thor sighs, defeated, because it had never occurred to him to wonder what else could matter and perhaps he has been selfish in that. Perhaps he had been selfish his whole life. Anyway, the wave of denial he has been riding that Loki – the Loki he had seen in this cell - had still been his brother after all –breaks like lightning striking the earth they stand in. He wishes he could have convinced himself more effectively and saved himself something of this grief – but there had never been a moment where he had not known his brother was still there, however much his tongue refused to acknowledge it. He cannot explain all of this to his father, but he supposes something of it must show in his face for Odin places an almost gentle hand upon his shoulder.

"You did not put him here," he says quietly – "Nothing here was of your doing". There is a tone of true forgiveness in his voice Thor cannot quite account for, and another of those looks clouds his face. There is something in his voice and manner that sits strangely with Thor but he cannot put his finger on what it is. He turns away before Thor can voice the protest hanging on his lips – _It may as well have been. _

"Take your time," he says, voice distant - "Do let me know when you take off again for Midgard."

"Father?" Thor begins, for Odin sounds so strange – but he has already gone and Thor is left feeling all that much emptier in his wake. His eyes roam sightlessly around the cell before staring unseeing at a small not quite fixed point near him on the floor. When he finally gathers his thoughts enough to look at what he was looking, at he sees it to be a book, left open very near the front of the cell. He picks it up and looks at the open page idly –

_I hate you Thor _he reads and the shock of seeing this and in Loki's handwriting is like suddenly hearing his voice from beyond death, snapping it into his ear, delicious in all its venom – _I hate you like a poison in the heart. In my heart brother – that black little twisted thing you suspect I have not –_

His fingers shake and the closeness of that voice in his ear makes him forget any moral objection enough to read on, read on though it could cut ribbons out of his grief, read to hurt himself as he is sure he deserves to hurt.

_Remember – _he reads – _all those times I said I hated you? Remember all the times I meant it and all the times we both knew I didn't? Remember how young we were when I would say it with a smile and I would feel warm and golden with it like I was soaking up the light and the heat you seemed to radiate as though you were the thrice damned sun itself. I remember how you would smile at me because you knew what I really meant. Well, there is no sun down here brother, and you too are just as far away and I hate you now so very, very dearly –_

Thor can barely read the last word for Loki had scratched through it with an angry hand, replacing it word after crossed out word with _bitterly, completely, passionately – _each word scribbled out with increasingly more furious scratches of ink until the sentence collapses into a great black mess, a furious, frustrated mashing of the pen into the paper until the paper is torn with it and ink splashed everywhere from a broken nib.

It hurts Thor more than he though he still had room to hurt. He flicks through the pages quickly, seeing that there is more in here that is addressed to him than otherwise. As though this were more a series of letters than a journal – yet a series of letters Thor suspects he was never meant to read.

He is torn, violently, between doing what is right and leaving the diary where he found it; and the fact that reading this, for all it has ripped at his heart, has brought Loki closer to him than he had thought would ever again be possible. It is nothing close to what he would like but for a moment that voice was so close in his ear – that voice that had so annoyed, captivated, tormented and delighted him for centuries – so close that it was something if just a scrap to hold onto so that he cannot let go now he has it. Besides which, has he not always, before now, won in the struggle to what is _right? _And now, standing in the rubble of Loki's wake, he reflects bitterly on the good it has done him.

It always was more difficult to know right from wrong where Loki was concerned.

He slips the diary under his cloak, held in his arm and, head lowered, leaves the cell like the thief in the night he feels himself to be.

_x_

When Thor's steps have faded and all trace of him is gone from these silent dungeons – for they are deserted now, left empty after the breakouts, the remaining prisoners moved and the place still in disrepair – Loki materialises in the cell he had, in truth, never left the whole time Thor was there. His eyes flick over the surfaces and objects Thor has touched and he sighs. His lips tug at the corners in something that does not know whether to be a smile or a grimace and his fist clenches around Odin's staff as though steadying himself.

"Ugh," he mutters, scanning the room, and the grunt sums up a great deal of all the thoughts scratching and biting their way through his brain. He forces a shrug he does not feel and disappears again, this time with no intention to ever return.

_x_

**Sorry, this is just a short update, working on the next bit now!**

**And yes, I was implying that the book Loki was reading at the front of the cell was his own journal. I can see him being that interested in his own writings!**


	3. Chapter 3

**3.**

Once again Thor's feet are traitors to everything that is right and good for him, and the heart that does not stop them leading him to Loki's erstwhile chambers instead of his own is no better. Stepping into the main room is a terrible rush to the senses, a blow to the head and the heart, a sucker punch to the gut that he supposes he should have expected and yet somehow, foolishly had managed not to. Not like this.

Loki's room is exactly as they left it that night before his would – be coronation. Years ago as that was, it now feels like several lifetimes. There is no sign that Loki even came here on his own since then. He can hear their voices still echoing around these walls, still lingering from the last time they were here, can hear Loki's laugh and the words that never quite made their way through his whimpered cries, still feel the fight in his kiss and the surrender in his body that was no surrender at all. This constant flicker of images in the fire before and behind his eyes is a madness assaulting his brain, repetitive and abusive upon his suffering heart. He wonders if it is his mind filling in details in the wake of what happened after that means he can see that strange look like guilt in Loki's eyes as they lay side by side in the furs by the fire. But no, he remembers he saw it even then –

_- frowning at the strange look in Loki's eye – only Loki could segue so quickly out of humming contentment and into fretful contemplation –_

_"__Loki what is it? What's wrong?" How quickly he always ran to comfort any slight concern he might see in those barely readable eyes. Loki – biting his lip as though there is much he would like to say, much perhaps, for which he is already sorry in advance._

_"__Nothing," he hears him say again – "It's nothing."_

_"__You don't have a nothing voice."_

_"__Just thinking –"_

_"__You're always thinking. When I'm king that'll be the first thing I put a stop to," he teases._

_"__Will you now?" Loki murmurs and he wants again to ask what is wrong, to press it but he has no sooner opened his mouth than Loki's lips are upon him hard, those slender, tender hands against his chest and he is helpless not to take those little wrists and pin his brother onto his back for the second time that night. _

He wishes now there had been some sense of fatalism, some hint that this would be the last time, a warning, anything to let him know to make it special. Or to do all he could to stop what was going to happen. He realises now that Loki was already wondering the same, though he had himself set these events in motion. But there was nothing, nothing to tell him to fight to keep this, this that he needed above anything else – he should have thought. Should have known. But nothing could have made him change that night, it would always have been perfect. With Loki, with all their constant friction and not in spite of it, it always was.

The room is in every way how they had left it, the rugs still piled in front of the crackling fire and – he frowns – who lights a fire in a dead man's room anyway?

He shakes his head and determines to ask his father about it. He realises he is treading carefully through Loki's room as though he is afraid it is going to hurt him. As soon as he realises he is doing it he wants to laugh, in detestation of himself and complete absence of amusement – _of course _it is going to hurt him, for is that not why he has come here? In the same way, he sits down in front of the fire, taking Loki's diary out from under his arm and placing it on his knee, staring warily at it for several moments as though certain it is going to bite him. _It is _going to bite him, he answers his own wondering. He does not allow himself to wonder long over whether or not he can take it before he opens the book quickly.

He cannot bring himself to open it at the start and read right the way through. _That _feels wrong, invasive – he would rather, at least for now, convince himself that there is no invasion of privacy in opening and reading random sections in no order – rather convince himself that somehow this does not count. What he cannot deny is how strongly he can hear Loki's voice behind the words and how much worse the content is than could have imagined.

_Tell me if you remember a day so warm it seemed the birds stopped singing for laziness; when the sunlight poured into the courtyard, bearing with it the call and scent of forest and sea, mountain and lake. All the coolest corners of the realm begged to be explored that day, to be taken –_

Yes, he remembers, he closes his eyes in a pain he wishes was not there, for how it rushes in on a memory so sweet. It was the day they first truly became something more than brothers, as though that had not anyway been enough to keep them close forever. There is not a moment of that glittering day by the waterfall that has not caressed and distressed his mind over and over so many times of late and Loki has it all written out here in a detail that wrings his heart like an ugly rag; _dear fates, _he thinks _will this never get easier?_

_- It was like flying and you the only thing that would keep me from floating completely away. We were perfect and I was worshipped and I wanted to be so forever. Then and there I set my sights too high for the rest of my life. _

No, he supposes, it will not. It should not. _Loki – _he thinks, _brother I'm sorry. _He thinks it over and over again, _I'm sorry, I'm so sorry – _frustrated and futile that it comes too late. He wishes he could just stop, stop reading, stop feeling, stop it all.

_I wanted to fly, I wanted to feel that sunshine, I wanted it so much more than I ever let you know and now for all that I am here, where the light never reaches. I told you I was jealous, I told you that I loved you. I never told you how much on either count. I never would have dared and – and other than that there was nothing I would not have dared –_

Thor holds the open journal against his chest, as though it could be Loki he was holding .the pain is too tight and sharp inside to cry anymore. He squeezes his eyes tight shut all the more to keep it in, he does not want to hurt anyone any more, least of all by letting what is inside him come out. He closes his eyes and without ever meaning to – falls asleep where he sits in front of the fire.

_x_

When he wakes he feels strange, heavy, drugged even. It takes him a while to remember where he is. A moment of happiness to be here before he remembers that Loki is gone, such as he has felt every day he has woken since then. Those few sweet seconds in which everything is as it should be making everything worse when the memories flood back in. He feels sick with it and confused at how he could have fallen asleep. If he had not known better he would say it felt like an enchantment.

He does not even know how much time has passed, just that when he becomes aware of himself he realises that Loki's journal is no longer in his hands and instead, when he uncurls them he finds a small heart shaped stone in his palm. He looks at it and immediately understands. That little stone makes him want to cry so immediately and so hard that nothing can come out of him. He remembers giving it to Loki as a midwinter gift centuries ago – a stupid thing he had found in a Midgard gift shop that claimed it had magical properties and he had in his innocent naïve unawareness believed it. Loki had said it was the stupidest present he had ever received and yet Thor knew he had kept it somewhere about his person every day for all those centuries. His fist clenches around the stone and feeling the soft cool curve in his hand he suddenly understands. It all makes sense, all the strangeness he has felt since coming back, the disappearance of Loki's journal and now this. There is only one incontrovertible explanation and he does not know whether to fear it or to smile.

Loki is haunting him.

_x_

**I did a slightly sneaky thing here and referenced a couple other stories I've written – Loki's journal entries are mostly from "A Study in Silver and Gold" which was the full story of the day I referenced here. Also I have a short 2-shot called "Heart Shaped Stone" which in this context is self-explanatory I think!**

**And yes, poor Thor is slow. :-(**


	4. Chapter 4

**4.**

_This sweet lazy summer day, they laze in the grass; half in half out of the shade, heads close together, fingers sometimes touching, too warm for anything more. Thor smiles to himself because there is nowhere else he wants to be, nothing he would rather be doing and because today in the languid heat the future is too far away to imagine. The sweet smell of the grass and Loki's hair close to his face, warm and sometimes tickling his nose - he laughs, warm and low like a lion purring and blows the dark strands away from his face. _

_"__Norns, but it's hot," he grumbles happily._

_"__It's a curious side effect of the sun being out," Loki replies in a lazy drawl._

_"__Shut up Loki." He stretches in the grass in satisfaction, full from their picnic beneath the trees, placid after Loki woke him this morning with his butterfly kisses and increasingly not so gentle attentions. Loki curls his hand, forming runes in the air, and a shimmering breeze ripples through the leaves above them, scattering shadow and sunlight over their resting shapes and caressing Thor's face with gentle, water-like cool. He smiles._

_"__Mmm, do that again –" This time Loki's tender fingers follow the stroke of the breeze, whispering across his skin as Loki turns to smile into his face, rolling over to plant lazy kisses around his jaw, and Thor feels that surge that you feel when the heart reminds you how dearly you love your beloved and it surprises at the same time as being no surprise at all. He leans his face into Loki's fingers, nuzzling, all but purring aloud, wondering at his luck in feeling so content, at having all he could ever want by his side now and forever as he sees it today._

_"__I love you brother –"_

_"__Oh do shut up –"_

_"__Loki –" he chides – "I'll always love you –_

- forever, Loki, just as I do today."

He wakes up with the words ringing in his head, taunting him as he sits up sweating and shaking as though from the worst of nightmares. His hand goes slowly to his face where he can feel the ghost of kisses still linger, as though the perpetrator were here in his room brief moments before. His brain fills in the time between the dream that is also a memory and now - and he knows that the feeling of strangeness means only that his haunting has not yet come to end.

It has gone on for weeks now, killing him by slow, agonising degrees. If he had any care at all for his own sanity he would have left; returned to Midgard days ago to pretend it was where he belonged. Start trying to re-make something of himself. But he has no such care, has not had ever since he fought Malekith so much in the hope that he would not win. He does not want his friends on Earth to try and make this better for him, cannot even voice these feelings to them.

So he stays, torturing himself with Loki's journal, dwelling in Loki's memories, in his hate, his rage, in all the thwarted, twisted feelings he tried to scratch out onto paper. The only thing that has come close to comfort is seeing that whatever his feelings for Thor were it is clear at least that Loki had been as fixated upon him as he has been in return. As he is now, if anything, more so for his brother's being gone.

The heart shaped stone disappeared again the first time he slept after finding it; simply proof if more were needed that his haunting is real.

There is more proof. Loki's ghost grows more troubling day by day. As the days become warm again in Asgard he would swear more and more he can feel that cool delicious breeze at the back of his neck. That otherworldly wind caressing his face so like those soft fingers he remembers; he turns his head every time to kiss them. It feels good and every time brings him close to breaking for weeping.

He wallows in the haunting, embraces it. Imagines he can take it as love from beyond the grave. Alternately, he torments himself wondering if Loki even did ever love him at all. He lives Loki, for all that he is dead, sleeps in his room, nose buried in an old shirt in which he can convince himself his brother's scent still remains. He wakes with that scent closer to him than he thought possible, sometimes could swear he can hear Loki's voice, a gentle whisper around the next corner he turns. He is never there.

At least not quite – for sometimes things are left where nobody could have put them as though giving him a message. He loses objects and finds them in the hollow tree they played in as boys, reaches into a pocket and finds an amulet or rune stone in there that was never his. Sometimes it fills him with the worst kind of hope, sometimes with a despair that comes as a relief.

On a few occasions he tries to discuss it with The Allfather, but his father is strange now, distant and not himself. He seems impatient with Thor but will not tell him why, a strange combination of pleased and irritated whenever Loki's name is mentioned as it so frequently is. He has changed more than Thor could have imagined, speaks strangely, walks differently, even sits differently and there is something beyond all this that he cannot put his finger on – something he feels like he should know but does not. He puts it down to his mother's death and it fills him with more sadness than he thought he had room left for.

He wishes she was here, that she could offer him some consolation and advice. He simply wishes she was here beyond that or any selfish personal reason. The wishing, of course, is utterly futile, foolish and self destructive as any other of his actions.

Day by day the haunting intensifies. As though the ghost has got into his head he will find himself thinking something foolish and objects will start flying around the room, often hitting him in the head as though to stop the flow of his thoughts. He wishes he were not so dull he could work out what Loki could be trying to tell him. Things found moved, runes found carved onto clear surfaces, even threaded into his clothes. As the strangeness gets stronger his hope actually rises. The idea finally takes root in him that maybe there is some way to get Loki back. He thinks to the stories he heard as a child in which warriors dared the realms of Hel to bring their loved ones back from that place. He wonders if it is injustice to assume that Loki went there as he always told Thor he was sure he would. They had mourned, as they grew up, the idea that the afterlife would separate them. Thor had never been able to take joy in the prospect of a seat in Valhalla if Loki were not there beside him.

The idea once sown grows and it is not long grown that Thor determines once and for all to discover how the trip to Hel might be undertaken. His mind set to it he knows he will spend the rest of his life if need be travelling every possible dimension and realm if he can find Loki in one of them and join him.

It is at that point, on the day he heads out to the Bifrost to speak to Heimdall, to find out how such a search may begin, that he finds the graffiti, sprayed in shocking, vivid green into the stable walls –

_Loki Lives!_

_x_

**I also still live! I'm sorry to you all for being gone so long. I been on holiday far from internets or any time to write! But I am back! I am writing! I sort of evilly hope I has been a little bit missed! Gonna make it up to everyone over the next week or so promise promise promise! :-)**


	5. Chapter 5

**5.**

Thor stares numbly at the words on the wall until they start to swim before his eyes, a bright dazzling green swirl that he does not – _cannot- _process or understand. Is it possible? Is it some kind of cruel joke? More to the point, who has done this? He stares at the words until he can make them focus once more in his swimming mind – _is it _Loki's handwriting? He has no sooner decided that it is than he decides just as definitely that it is not.

He finds his knees swimming as though seeing this, here, sudden and unexpected as a blow, has floored him completely and he sinks to the floor on the corridor, staring at the words on the wall. He wonders if he is going crazy. He supposes it certainly looks like he is going crazy. Not that he cares any more. He _feels _crazy. He needed Loki, needed Loki's madness to keep him sane. Maybe there are no words here at all. Maybe it's just him, sitting in the middle of a corridor staring at a blank wall with tears running down his neck unchecked again.

Maybe someone else has done this, either as a joke or to tell him without wanting to say it to his face. Maybe Loki is _here _in Asgard and someone else has spotted him.

Or maybe Loki did this himself. Maybe the ghost has become that much stronger, to the point of being able to do this. Or maybe it _was _Loki doing this to stop him from going all the way to Hel to find him. But if it _is _and he cares enough to do that why does he not just reveal himself and end Thor's misery? Why would he stand by and watch this? Can he really be so unaware of Thor's breaking every day inside? Or perhaps he is aware and wants to see it. He alternately thinks and does not think Loki could do something like that. Perhaps he has no intention, no especial sympathy or malice and simply wants to see what Thor will do.

So many maybes Thor feels his head screaming and screeching, tearing apart with it.

When he hears the footfalls coming down the corridor, there is a moment in which he is certain it is Loki. He looks up and is horrified by how hard this foolish hope plummets at the sight of his father. Plummets and then, for some reason he cannot name, floats inches before hitting rock bottom.

"Do you see it?" he asks hollowly. His father nods.

"What do you intend, my son?"

"I set out this way to see Heimdall – to send me into any afterlife he could that I might seek my brother there," he recites it like a line he has rehearsed, reminding himself of that earlier intention. An intention that somehow seems simpler than the thoughts crowding on him now.

"And now?" Obviously his father lands straight at the most relevant question.

"Now I –" Thor wavers, sighs as deep as a whole sea surging and swelling. He stands slowly, with new resolution – "I will do as I intended. If Loki _is _here he is not making himself known to me. I cannot sit forever staring at a vague hope on a wall."

"You cannot simply journey into Hela's realm –"

Thor cannot believe his father knows him so little by now that he does not realise how telling him he cannot confirms his intention to do something.

"I do not need it to be simple," Thor says – "I _need _Loki to know there are no lengths to which I will not go to get him back. I need –" he repeats – "My brother."

His father stares at the floor for a long beat and Thor can see his shoulders heave.

"I cannot talk you out of this, can I?" he says finally.

"You cannot".

"And do you suppose," Odin says – "If it were the other way around, Loki would do the same for you?"

"It is not the other way round." Thor finds his stubborn intent solidify beneath resistance.

"I cannot approve this venture –" Odin says, as though Thor had not gathered that already, then adds, to his immense surprise and slight horror – "But I can come with you."

"Father no –"

"If there is atonement to be made it is mine as much as yours –" suddenly the All-father sounds more certain of himself than he did before – "I am coming with you Thor."

"I cannot talk you out of this can I?" Thor echoes his father's words from moments ago.

"No. Now - " Odin smiles, strangely – "When do we start?"

Thor feels a chill at the words and a sudden certainty that no matter what and whatever comes of it – this venture will get him his brother back.

"Now," he banishes the chill with his own intent – "We start now."

_x_

**Short chapter I'm sorry – but I was so long working out what was going to happen next that I now have a lot of the journey to Hel planned out so I figured I'd post this filler chapter today and start on the journey proper tomorrow!**

**Btw, I know that in a strange departure from my norm I have not done a chapter of this from Loki's pov – this is an intentional decision that will be rectified in a few chapters time!**


	6. Chapter 6

**6.**

"I cannot take you where you would ask me to go," Heimdall says, almost as soon as they have passed over his threshold.

"Heimdall –" Thor tries, but Heimdall holds up a hand to cut him off before he can go with this any further.

"Do you think you are the first?" he says and, deadpan as he ever is there is an unmistakable note of weariness in his voice – "Do you not think others have come time and again to ask me this? The gates of Hel do not open to the living and there is nothing even I can do to change that. Nor should we."

"You're saying there is no way –" Thor says the words but does not believe them even as they come from him.

"I am saying there is no way _I _can send you. There is a way but none who have tried it have ever come back."

"I will try it." Thor insists – "And I will come back."

"Thor –" Odin begins but this time Thor cuts him off, almost growling;

"I will do it alone if need be!"

"No" Odin sighs, irritatingly calmly to Thor's ears – "You will not. Heimdall?"

"If you would do it - go to the well of Urdr at the centre of Asgard," Heimdall says "This well links to the well of Mimir in Midgard and Hverglmir within the gates of Hel. While I could take you to the other side of those gates in Niflheim, they would never open to you, nor is there any other way to cross the high wall with which that real surrounds itself. This is the only way but I must –"

But Thor is already gone, before any such caution can be made.

_x_

Everyone knows where the well of the fates lies in Asgard, hidden beneath a root that erupts out of the ground like a volcano out of nowhere and curls in upon itself like a sea serpent. They say it is a root of the world tree itself. Everyone knows, but nobody visits that dark, cold place unless it is on the same mission that Thor now finds himself.

"You're really going to do this?" his father asks, eyebrow arched, sounding so unlike himself that Thor wises for the umpteenth time that he could be doing this alone.

"You should hold on to me so as to come out in the same place." Thor replies, not looking at him and his father takes hold of his arm as they take the deepest of breaths and step over into the wide mouth of the well that gapes for them like a hungry animal that will never want to spit out what it has swallowed.

They have no sooner dropped into the cold darkness than Thor loses the feel of the grip upon his arm, but in the swirling black like a river there is nothing he can do. He is tossed down a river between twisting roots, thrown and beaten like driftwood caught in the current. He cannot breathe and the water is rank and inky in his nose and mouth, it is part like drowning, part falling, part carried violently upon the surge. The roots that rear up out of the darkness like foul clawing tentacles clutch at him, threatening to hold him under forever, but he struggles through them. Even the sickening buffeting fall is better than being held to drown under here. Long after he has felt like his breath will hold out no longer the water begins to froth and foam around him, to turn white and swirling as though a hundred whirlpools spun in one place all headed in different directions. He knows when it surrounds him that he will die here, that it will crash him to pieces and in that moment he does not care. It makes him feel no less like he is headed to where Loki is and now, in this blasting horror it is enough. He has no sooner closed his eyes, making his peace with it more easily than he ever wanted it to be, than he is being thrown out into a cold worse than the water, out of the foam and into a stinging icy brightness, spat out indeed upon the shores of Hel.

He lies in the ice coughing and spluttering and is only just coming to terms with the awareness that he is not dead when the well gives up its other victim. He drags himself across the ice to where Odin lies, for the moment motionless on the ground. Several sickening seconds of thinking he is dead before he too begins to splutter up water, clawing at the frozen ground for steadiness. He meets Thor's eye almost rolling his, shaking his head – shaking away all attempts from Thor to help him to his feet, to help them stand together. Saying nothing until they are both standing, looking out across the bleak awfulness that awaits them and saying, so cheerfully he supposes his father can only have gone mad –

"Well then. Shall we?"

The entry to Hel looms up out of the horizon, black ice on black ice, gaping open like the waiting mouth of a monster into which they are against all reason going to walk freely. The very size of the maw is almost enough to drive Thor insane; not that he feels madness too far away these days as it is. The towering sides of the gap reaching up and up to create a spinning sensation of vertigo even from standing on the ground looking up. There is no way that anything good could reside in such a place; nevertheless they set out across the ice towards it, skidding and scrambling as much as walking.

It is not a proud approach; this realm will not allow for that. It is a humiliating slither across the ice as Thor more uses Mjolnir to drag himself across that slippery path than he walks it, Odin dragging himself up behind him, using Thor as his anchor. They are all but frozen, knives of ice cutting through the insides before they have travelled any perceivable distance. Eventually Thor looks down yet another time into the dark ice and sees _things _caught and frozen in the very act of slithering beneath the dark surface. He has no doubt that if that ice were to crack they would stir instantly back into whatever awful life they had. He tries not to look down again.

Time falls apart in a place like this; impossible to say how long it is before they reach the river that borders that terrible mouth. But they lie, clinging to the bank as the floor feels like it will slide them all the way back down to whence they came. There is no way either of them want to enter that water, which is doubtless freezing as well seemingly sticky, tar – like and oily. He looks away from the narrow glare of hopelessness on his father's face, wishes he would not say it but he does, a dreadful lost –

"Why?" That he cannot help but wonder himself. Indeed his mind has done nothing but ask this question and give it answer enough to keep going over and over since this began – it already feels like years ago. The question _why, _the answer that keeps him going always the same, always _Loki. _

It is with that answer still reverberating in his mind that he takes another deep breath and sinks into the swirling water.

_x_

**I was gonna write the whole journey through Hel in one long section and post it in the next couple of days but what the hey, I'll split it into a couple and give you this today already – plus cliff hanger so enjoy! **

**For those who are interested I'm taking my version of Hel and Niflheim from mythology more than Marvel….cause I like it. I'm using Snorri's Prose Edda, an account in ****_Gesta Danorum _****and a bunch of useful stuff a friend told me about the Well of the Fates which I'm not certain of the references for! I'm also making stuff up 'cause I roll that way!**


	7. Chapter 7

**7.**

The waters of Hel are not the ice cold plunge he was expecting. Neither do they peel the skin from his flesh with their boiling heat. Instead the water is perfect, wickedly delicious, sucking you in and making you want to stay, soft and inviting as silk. It is not fast flowing or syrupy and the crossing seems, worryingly, like it is going to be easy. The only thing Thor finds a little hard to stomach is the darkness; in the blackness of the water it impossible to know how deep it is, the inky blue swirls that gently caress the skin are like ribbons that constantly threaten to form into shapes. It is not until he is halfway across that the pale figures start to take form below the water. He starts to feel them before he sees them, fingers from below stroking for his legs, reaching to curl around him, gentle – gentle as the water until looking down he can see the pale hands reaching insistently up, up, up from whatever depths lurk below. Colourless faces begin to appear, pressing up from down below, beseeching faces with wide black open mouths like fish and just as wide open pure black eyes, just these three dark pools in the face that seem to be filled with the water around him and reflecting nothing back. These open, wailing mouths make no terrible sound except to gasp loudly as if for air and he can hear the heartbeats flutter around him in the water, beneath the horribly warm and clammy skin, the bones poking out of skinny rib cages, the hands reaching at him, more and more grasping, wanting him not so much to join them as to help them and he cannot – they drag him under just enough for him to panic, face to face with those terrible visages- and then he re-surfaces, with the hands pawing at him gently. He does not want to look, does not want to see these helpless souls or whatever they may be, more for fear that the next face he looks down at he will recognise as Loki's than for even their own terrifying needs and grasping hands.

He is breathing heavily, a sliver away from screaming by the time he reaches the far bank and feels a hand extended to pull him out, shocked out of the horror to find his father already at the other side and looking down at him, scowling, almost – he cannot help but think – laughing.

"You could have just asked me – or – you know – used your hammer."

After that ordeal in the water it is all Thor can do not to punch him. They move on.

Inside the halls of Hel the walls are like mountains, everything still black and looming, only now with a dreadful stickiness to everything and a smell like death. This, at least, Thor was prepared for. He was not prepared for the long, slow walk down this titanic path. If anything he had pictured the half of Hel as a darker Asgard, a horrible place certainly but one that made some kind of sense. He was a fool. He wishes Loki was here to tell him so. Sense has no place here; this is a place of madness. The sheer stone walls ripple and run, Thor suspects with blood, and the floor beneath his feet is likewise not quite solid. He remembers how Loki was so scared of the dark as a child he would come to Thor's bed at night rather than face it alone. He came so often it became an excuse, but Thor never forgot that there was a real fear behind it, and though he had never mocked him, even as a child, it was not a fear he could have understood himself until now.

They walk with their arms out for not being able to see any distance in front of them, no clue what might come out of the dark or if the path will suddenly turn or stop. They walk like this for all ages and then the mists appear. Just as Thor is starting to think that some change – any change from the never-ending darkness would be a good thing – the mists. Swirling up out of the ground at first it seems, white mists in the dark like flurries of snow, ghostly and ribboning around them. It is _not _better. The threads of eerie white constantly twist, never quite into faces but always skimming just slightly away from anything definitive. It is a new age of walking, one hand out before him and the other on his hammer.

This is the pattern: when one horror appears to be coming to a merciful close the next follows hard on its heels. So it is that as the mist fades, the hall, or tunnel, or whatsoever it is down which they are walking begins to shrink. At first this is a relief, for the towering heights of the walls cause the head to spin and that terrible feeling of falling, but before they really know it Thor finds his head bumping on the top of the tunnel. He carries on at a crouch until the tunnel comes in on that too and he finds himself crawling through a space like a rabbit warren, clamped in either side by the sticky walls, dripping their tarry substance onto his face and skin. He stops for any more of this and they will become wedged.

"Do we turn back?" Odin asks.

"No," Thor insists, stubborn, even while he does not know how they can possibly continue, crouched in this dark hall that barely holds him – "No –" he repeats, shaking his head as best he can – "We carry on. Make me smaller."

And so they both shrink down in size, more and more as the tunnel narrows down to a pinprick and Thor almost despairs, knowing they can shrink no further – but then – almost imperceptibly at first but then more and more apparent – the tunnel begins to widen again in front of them and they grow slowly with it until back to full size, though the tunnel does not stop. Now it opens out into a wide amphitheatre, the sides black and shiny and reflective. When Thor looks into the surfaces like screens he begins to see his life captured in there, memories – as he remembers only in the worst of ways. Here is nothing of any good that may ever have occurred, just himself and everything he has failed to do. More and more there is Loki, here mirrored and repeated over and over again, an unforgiving reel of all the times he has failed his brother. In these screens Loki dies on him over and over again and every time he has the chance and does not take it to save him. Every time it is his fault. Over and over until he can no longer stand in the centre of this place whispering _no _to the pictures that may be all around him; or they may be in his mind- he can no longer tell. He is on the floor with it screaming, screaming how sorry he is, screaming to Loki to forgive him, with no conviction left as to any reason why he should. This is Hel, more than any of the tricks on the way in – they are nothing to being here in the place that is your life gone wrong. Now for the first time he knows he cannot go on, that this is where it ends. This is the hall of Hel where he will stay alone with his own screaming fading into nothing and a growling like the wolf in his belly that is the famine of failure.

"Do you offer yourself in his place?"

A voice rings through the pain, through the shiny dark, clear as a cutting bell, snide and cruel. Thor looks up to find the speaker and feels his father's hand on his shoulder as he stands. Before him is a stage and on the stage a chair. In the chair a figure in red, horns dripping ribbons of something crimson.

"Would you stay in the hunger of the world?"

Thor frowns, mind dancing on the edge of the last of reason but his heart thinks _yes _and the speaker hears it.

"You would not be the first," she says, and he supposes it is a lady though half of her is rotted almost down to the bone and those ribbons he thought were garments the last of her insides. She rises with a knife in her hand. This is the Lady of Hel and somehow he still has it in him to be afraid of her.

"So many come here with the same request," She says, and her voice is jagged, cold and dark. "Though few of them make it this far. Tell me –" her voice is mocking, but it demands to be answered – "Did you think Hel was in the way of granting wishes? Cannot you heed your own adages and find what you seek within yourself?"

Thor slowly rises, slowly steadying himself, slowly clenching his fists to clench the body, clench the soul – stop it all from trembling.

"He is within me," he replies – "In my heart but –"

"It is not enough?" she cocks her head to one side like a bird.

"Is he here?" Thor asks, no longer able to be patient even with this nightmare creature. This nightmare creature, who now begins to laugh. She throws her head back and laughs and laughs, the terrible cawing sound ringing round and round the arena, overlapping itself in a terrible cacophony of noise. Thor waits, impatiently, for the reply he so dreadfully needs. The lady looks at him, finally, smiling in the most genuine amusement ever to disgrace Hela's face.

"He is here," she grins. For a moment her eyes meet Thor's in a sympathy he cannot verify the truth of, then they dart to look piercingly over his shoulder –

"Of course he is here – for you brought him with you."

In those last sweet moments in which he is still denied a lack of understanding he looks over his shoulder, following her gaze to where the figure of his father flickers like a glitch on a screen. The image bites its lip and sighs. It shimmers gold and green and, in the space of Thor's next blink Loki is stood clearly behind him and he understands it all in astounded horror. Loki looks back at him, narrow eyed and unreadable, then looks down, shuffles for all the world like a naughty schoolboy caught in a prank;

"Damn," he announces. "You got me."

_x_

**Drum roll! Quite pleased with this section, though it went a little Dante despite all my best efforts. Next chapter we'll actually be looking inside that tricksy boy's head for a change and won't that be fun! :-)**


	8. Chapter 8

**8.**

A teeming swarm of thoughts and feelings slam all at once into Loki's head, buzzing around like bees and bashing at the inside of his skull. Above all is the overwhelming instinct to flee before the look that he can see in Thor's eyes. He can see a swarm in there too, reactions battling behind the blue, dominated by the fight between delight and fury - with fury he very much suspects winning out. It is all he can do to stay where he is and not begin some horrible cowards chase throughout the halls of Hel and beyond. If he runs now, he suspects they could both end up running until Ragnarok.

Greater than the instinct to run, however, is the feeling of extreme relief. Relief that he did not expect for this game being finally over. Oh, he has spent long enough watching Thor and smirking to himself but he is still aware that a great deal of that smirking has been for appearances only, even if they were appearances that nobody would see. There was never enough amusement in there to reach his eyes, let alone his heart.

He had really deeply wanted to be amused at watching Thor' struggles. He had wanted to witness his distress in the prison cell. He had wanted to see him weep over him, wanted to watch his pain and grief and to gather all that into a cruel greedy hug, hold it close to himself and accept it as an evidence of love that he could, in the constant knowledge of his own meanness, actually accept.

He had not wanted it to _hurt. _He had not wanted to feel bad for Thor. To feel his pain as though he were mourning his own loss. He had not wanted to feel this urge to comfort him and in that urge to feel _bad _about this subterfuge. He had not expected- or prepared, anyway- to deal with the ache of seeing his brother in pain like this. To feel with every new thing he observed like he was evil for not dropping it all and melting back into himself for Thor to see. But it _did _hurt, and the hurt made him all the more scared, more unable to drop the act and therefore have to deal with it. Returning to himself in appearance would mean so much more than just that – he could not even begin to think about it. He had convinced himself he was beyond that kind of hurt, that kind of stupid sentiment. He had convinced himself so damn hard.

_Now you see me brother, _he reminded himself every time – reminded himself that he _had _let his guard drop not so long before and let Thor see him as no-one else had – reminded himself that Thor had still not once acknowledged him as his brother. Not even acknowledged that he had done this thing and all that it had cost him. He told himself that Thor had meant it when he said he no longer saw him as his brother, citing as evidence the number of times he had let the word drop and it had never once been picked up and returned. He had to tell it to himself again and again for Thor was a terrible liar and he had not believed he really meant it for a moment, however much he would have liked to torture himself with that belief.

And so, in his own wake, he had sought all the evidence he could that Thor cared. That he mourned him. That he could not live without him. It was not unknown to him that there were people who wished their loved ones to be happy after they died. He was not one of those people and so he scorned the very possibility. He had thought he would do nothing but enjoy it when it first occurred to him that Thor really _was _mourning and the bitterness caught in his throat when he realised that he could not take the pleasure he had imagined as simply as he had hoped.

Then Thor had announced his intent to go to Hel to look for him and if he had been looking for proof enough it seemed to Loki that this was finally it. He had done all he could to convince him out of it but the idiot was as intent as he always became once he settled on an idea. It was infuriating. He had literally spelled it out for him with the writing on the wall and yet the oaf had managed not to understand even that! He had been ready to scream at the thick headedness. He did not _want_ Thor to go to Hel; it was not a part of his plan that had seemed so amusing at the start. More than that he knew few people returned from such a venture alive. The urge to just reveal himself there and then and have it over with, end Thor's evident suffering, had been so strong but his inability to let it go, his own stubbornness, unwilling to be that easy on himself even if it meant being at least as cruel to Thor – it was stronger. And so it was to punish himself that he had insisted on accompanying him. It was, though he would not go to quite these lengths in self admission – because if Thor died in this venture he could only go with him. It was because he guessed how dreadful the journey could be and wished it all upon himself already as it was.

It was keeping up the image of The All Father whilst they went through it all that had been perhaps the hardest part. Through the wells and across the ice he had been so fixed just on moving, on staying unhurt that it was more than he had thought – on so many occasions – he could do to keep the glamour up. But the dark had been the worst of all, for that child who had always been so scared of it had been begging and crying inside him to be let out. So much instinct just to rush into Thor's arms for comfort. If Thor had not been so focussed on getting through it himself he would have found it hard to believe he had not noticed how Loki flickered and shivered beside him, the image so close to breaking up, the crying for fear echoing so loud in his insides he felt sure it had to be audible.

But they had got through. Somehow, they had got through. And then the theatre of all his failures – it had not crushed him as it had crushed Thor. He was closer to his failures; he lived with them every day, indeed he so often imagined them that they were worse inside his head than even Hel could ever render them. The pictures had changed to torture him with memory instead, a montage of what used to be, how _they _used to be. And it was worse. The bitterness and regret of that loss welled up inside him like it would drown him – but then even that could not bring him to his knees for these days the same feelings belaboured him often enough that there was little Hel could do to him that he had not imagined worse on himself. He wondered what it was that Thor had seen; he hoped and feared both desperately that it had been something to do with him.

His search had ended when Thor had insisted he would take Loki's place in Hel. He was unsure how to assimilate that, what to do with the knowledge, but still, even if he had not been uncovered he would, at that point have revealed himself – or if not quite at that point at one that gave him a slightly better advantage than he ended up with.

And so he stood, holding ground he felt was about to be rapidly whipped out from under him, Thor staring him down with all the force of the thunder in his eyes. It was all Loki could do not to cringe in expectation of the storm.

"_Loki," _Thor growls, and it cracks and reverberates around the cavernous hall, so much threat in it, so much betrayal, horror and still – which is the worst of it to Loki – so much love that it makes him shake for fear, knowing that everything he has avoided for so long is within seconds of being thrown violently his way.

Stopping himself from cringing is no longer an option.

The storm is coming and he is ready to get drenched.

_x_

**:-)**

**Storms are most definitely a' comin! ;-)**


	9. Chapter 9

**Warning: sex also violence, maybe a little bit at the same time. :-)**

**9.**

Thor's growl of fury reverberates around the cavernous hall. He wants to keep it in, wants to work this through in a sensible way, but Loki has always pushed through his intentions, his very ability to do the right thing. Loki _always _does this. He hates him for it. He can feel the rage rushing up through his body, red and pulsing like the bloods of war. It is a battle cry, one beneath which it would be unthinkable to be calm. His last thought before the tide takes over is that he knows this fury; it is the fury of the berserker, it will plunge him head first into the fight and worse still is that, after what feels like an age of emotional void it feels _good._

Hammer in hand, the God of Thunder leaps, blinded by his goal; Loki flicks himself to one side and out of the way of the hurricane, neatly, sidestepping so quickly it would have been impossible in anyone else. Mjolnir crashes into the ground, cracks spider-webbing out in all directions. Thor pulls his teeth back in a snarl, leaves the hammer where it lies and throws himself at Loki. This time – and with the threat of a fatal pummelling gone, Loki lets himself be thrown to the floor – he cannot deny that he has really been waiting for this after all and he puts the last breath he has before Thor crashes into him into saying –

"So you missed me, then".

Thor roars at this, barely registering Loki's words, but if it is possible they do enrage him further; he charges like a bull at Loki, the red flag he has always been, the inflammatory, enraging, irritating beyond damnation bastard of a little brother. Loki takes it, being thrown through the air to land on his back, Thor like a lion doing battle coming down on him tooth and claw. He has always – or almost always – held back from actually hitting Loki when they have fought in the past – he knew it was an unfair fight - time was he was even sensitive of a need not to hurt Loki too much, of a knowledge of their respective strength and of fairness. But damn him, Loki has stripped all of that from him – fairness, sensitivity – every rational thought, every code he has tried to cling to ripped apart and blown to the winds by just one breath from those lying lips.

Loki does not even struggle; he lets Thor beat him into the ground, his heart singing in a kind of joy, in the satisfaction of knowing how much he deserves it. The sense of relief lies so strangely beside the pain of Thor's fists that he finds himself laughing, close to insanity from the confusion of it.

"I should have known this is where we'd end up –" he gasps out from under blows – "You beating me to a pulp in Hel itself."

He laughs again and it alarms Thor to the point of pausing, arm raised, to frown and before he can speak Loki hisses out, more vicious than he knew he felt –

"_Did you mourn?" _

_What would be the point_, Thor finds it in him to think – and in wearing his fists out on Loki he has at least cut through some of the red fog enough to think a little – _of saying so even if he had. He remembers the last time. He remembers it being thrown back in his face. How dare he? He thinks, how dare he mock the weight like boulders he has been struggling under all this time. _

"How dare you," is all he manages and it is not really a question.

"Well don't stop," Loki half laughs, half spits, and it is annoying enough that Thor _does _throw a few more punches his way. But it is half hearted now and with the fury subsiding, a grim, squirming sense of self-loathing creeps in to take its place. Loki raises an eyebrow up at him, cut and trickling blood – they do not bruise easily, the almost-gods – but Loki is as bruised and cut up now as he was on Midgard – and loving it.

"So tell me –" he grins, smirking – "Was it good for you?"

Thor frowns, before realising with horror that his cock is throbbing with hardness and Loki wriggling obscenely beneath him to aggravate it. He pushes him back down, grunting in an attempt at disgust – well the disgust is real enough but it is no longer directed solely at Loki – and gets to his feet quickly, hauling Loki up like a sack behind him and not letting go.

"Where is our father?" he snarls.

"I'm sorry _– our _what?" Loki spits, Thor shakes him –

"Where is _my _father? What did you do?"

"Oh that's right - blame me."

Thor pulls Loki's head back viciously by the hair until Loki's eyes start to leak and he capitulates –

"I didn't do _anything - _alright? He was so _delighted _to see me the sheer _joy _put him into one of his stupid ill – timed sleeps. He's been there, in his room the whole time – which you'd know if you'd ever looked there instead of always moping about in mine."

"You _knew _that?"

Thor remembers the weight and destroying pain of his mourning and something in his heart shrivels to think that Loki watched it and did nothing.

"I knew _everything –" _he growls, half spiteful, half smug – "Now maybe you should stop stroking my hair if you hate me so much."

Thor realises, only on being told, that he has been and pulls Loki's hair again savagely, furious with his hands that despite his rage at Loki they instinctively reach for him, indeed a part of him never wants to let go, never wants to stop touching him ever again.

"Heh –" Loki gasps out, through the sting, lip curling – "Now give us a kiss."

Thor remembers, as Loki doubtless meant him to – the last time he said that and he cannot believe that on top of everything else Loki could mock him with this – with all that they used to have and to be. But he cannot tear away and it is partly to punish Loki and partly to feed the madman he has summoned in his heart that he falls upon Loki's lips like a starving animal and Loki, never for a moment imagining that he would, fighting to push him away while his teeth and tongue clash back frantically, as much in need of this as Thor. They both fight to kiss deeper and to tear away all at once, hands in each other's hair, tangling, pulling, wrenching, stroking. It is still a fight and Thor's heart races with it, rushing back to life as it can only be with Loki's body pulled tight against his, for all the pain and hate and need _alive _again. He pulls back, teeth bared, feeling Loki's hardness grow against him, snarling –

"I hate you Loki, I hate you _so much."_

Loki grins as though he could not have heard a sweeter term of endearment.

"Hate me then," he breathes – "But fuck me while you do it."

He twists his legs around Thor's waist, clinging to him like a vine; he will always be that vine, growing wildly in the shade, and Thor drives him back, still kissing, feral hungry kisses, licking the stream of blood that runs down one pale cheek, until Loki's back hits a wall. Loki mutters impatient magic to free their cocks and in seconds nearly screams to feel Thor's length sliding against his. Thor cannot wait; this is not supposed to be sweet or tender – he spits into his hand, rubbing it into his cock and shoves into Loki unceremonious and rough, Loki screaming and shrieking for lack of any better preparation. Even as he hates Thor his head falls forward onto his shoulder, his hands balling his cloak into fists as he clings on, as Thor rams him into the wall, all that lust and pain, fury and relief driving into Loki's body until he is crying from fear of all that emotion rather than the pain of Thor's savage thrusts.

Thor does not ease up for Loki's tears, indeed if he were being honest with himself, which he cannot be about this, he finds himself all the more aroused for hearing Loki cry. But he cannot hold out for long beneath the loveliness of the feeling, being back inside his brother after far far too long. Loki's wild clenching around his cock finishes him in minutes and he comes like a breaking storm, soaking Loki completely in the thundering rain. At the feel of it pouring into him Loki's comes with a whimper, clinging, face buried in Thor's shoulder like the child he all but was the very first time, barely noticing the blood dripping into his eyes and the tears streaming over his lips into his mouth.

It is as they shake against each other, buffeted by their own storm, that the applause rings out and they remember they are still in the coliseum of Hel and that this is no wall they are up against but the side of the stage. They look around, rapidly fixing their clothing to see the Lady herself, watching them with such a grin Loki can almost see the family resemblance.

"Well bravo," she drawls - "This stage hasn't seen such a show in _centuries."_

_x_

**In case anybody didn't know – but I'm sure you all do – the family resemblance to Hel is on Loki's side since she's usually his daughter, though I'm not running too far down that road in this, that's probably all the mention it'll get! ….she did just fangirl over watching her dad and uncle have sex though now that I think about it!**

**In other news I'm really happily surprised I actually got this written, I've just had the most stressful few days at work….all errors are entirely the fault of that customer who screamed at me for literally twenty minutes without stopping!**


	10. Chapter 10

**10.**

Needless to say it is Loki who finds the ability and the words to speak first; Thor looks at the back of his head, at his own feet, the floor, anything to avoid the amusement in Hela's eyes. Loki, of course, does not even seem to care. If anything her amusement seems to amuse him in turn.

"Well, I'm so happy to entertain." He raises his eyebrows – "I do hope you got it on camera."

The lady blinks once and looks at him sharply. Thor is desperately glad it is not him – he is not sure he could stand up under that blood red gaze for more than seconds. Again Loki does not seem to care.

"I'm…..curious –" she continues in a voice like piled ashes, a voice that has known curiosity only rarely – "Where in all the realms do you think you are going to go from here?"

Finally Thor finds his voice, puts his hands on Loki's shoulders, un-nerved by the way he is grinning at her so unwaveringly.

"Home," he says, as though it is simple and obvious. He feels Loki shift in his hands, a little uncomfortable at this simplicity. The lady smirks and Loki shifts beneath that also, not liking the attention of those eyes that see too much and too deep.

"And you," she says, as he feared she would – "Is the answer so simple for you too?"

"It is –" Loki chokes on his own words, throat tightening around them – "That is none of your concern!" he snaps – "Know your place, child!"

She laughs at this.

"Like you know yours? It's a fine example I've been given, _dad –" _

Loki winces and Thor frowns at him; just another of the things he has kept hidden for centuries.

"Oh do stop," Loki groans – "Before this turns into one of those terrible Midgardian TV shows. The kind they run all day with the bad words bleeped out."

This time they all frown at him, in the lady's case, not for very long.

"_My _place is _here," _she states – "And yours is not – and much as I'm loving this little family reunion –" she appears very suddenly behind them, as though switched off in one place and turned back on in another – "I really must call it a day, now."

She bends suddenly and with a horrible cracking sound, to whisper low to Loki's ear and her breath is like bones and the mummified dead –

"_Know you have started down a path that can end only with the wolf at the door," _she whispers and Loki feels his blood run cold – "_Look to the sun father, for only when it has gone down his throat will your legacy be over."_

And before either of them see it happening there is a squirmy, invasive sensation like fingers wriggling their way into their brain, a feeling they both remember from before. There is a crash of brightness like fainting into the sun and they fall back, shaking and nauseous, onto the Bifrost leading out of Asgard. The rainbow glimmers and the stars swirl and if it was not so sickening it would be more beautiful than could be described.

"Urgh –" Loki groans, holding his head as he sits up first – he remembers this feeling – it is upsettingly the same as when he was sent down to earth with the Bifrost broken. But it is worse this time, with that prophecy ringing like carrion cawing in his ears. He only hopes there is still all the time in the world for it to haunt him. He thinks about this and a crazy laugh begins in his toes that he cuts off in the throat – _all the time in the world – _but of _course _there is!

Beside him Thor is also sitting up, groaning, remembering;

"There needs to not be entities that can do that."

Thor looks sideways at Loki, heart and head over-full with questions; things he needs to shout, scream, demand, know. Loki looks back at him expectantly, unblinking, ready to hear them all and, by all appearances, cheerful in his readiness.

It _is _only by appearances. Thor should know better. He does not.

Instead he sighs, heavily, heart leaden with all the words that will not come out, finding only –

"What happens now?"

They are lonely words, lonelier still out here in the sky, the stars above and the rainbow below. Loki raises an eyebrow, but it is not in the nonchalance he would wish, rather in uncertainty and a hollow kind of sadness –

"I was rather hoping you'd tell me."

"You _died _Loki," Thor retches up the words – "You died – again – I –"

"And did you –"

"Don't you dare. You _know _that I did." The anger that had left him and left him languishing and lonely, returns to fill him up and it is a sweet relief. It covers the understanding he is getting that nothing his fixed, perhaps nothing ever can be. Loki sees only the anger in Thor's face and he leans in closer, eyes narrowing to hiss –

"_Why do you care?"_

The brief light shivers in Thor's eyes, nearly goes out and is replaced with something Loki likes an awful lot less.

"I love you Loki," he looks up, afraid, hopeful, afraid of his own hope – to see if Loki will register it, just this once and there is so much despair in his look and in his voice, so matter of fact and unhappy with the fact, that Loki does – he has to, for he scowls deeply and looks away. It bites at his heart.

"Don't."

"I love you."

"Stop it."

"I love you."

Loki's lips pull back from his teeth and he snarls, turning fear into disgust, disgust into viciousness, he whips his arm out, stabbing three vicious fingers into the scar he knows still aches a little in Thor's side–

"_Don't" _he repeats, savagely, the poke reminding Thor of every reason why he should not. It is like loving a poisonous snake, a beautiful, glittering, venomous snake; wanting to hold it close and protect it however much it thrashes, however much the venom stings.

"I do," he insists, flat and intent. Loki jabs him again in the wound that he made, the wound a part of Thor loves for having been given to him by his brother- and a part of him hates for the same reason. Loki growls and flies at Thor like an angry cat, tooth and claw, a flurry of vicious little punches that hurt the God of Thunder about as much as drops of rain. It is for Loki and not for himself that he will not let him go on, taking his wrists and twisting him easily onto his back on the bridge, swinging over him and holding him firmly down as he struggles and all but spits.

"Ah," Loki bites out when he has stopped struggling – "So we fight then. Good call, Thor."

Thor bristles with pounding feelings, the berserker in the blood roaring at him to fight, more than ever to put down this creature that so wrecks him inside and out. It is a primal call, hot in his ears, a call if not to fight then to mate, to release, not to hold back, to rip this insinuating song out of his blood and give it up to the stars. He does not. It is through clenched teeth that he hears himself say –

"I will not fight you brother."

Echoes of the past so close in their ears, echoes of the last time they were here. Could he bring that back? Call it up and change it? All of these thoughts taking tentative shape in his mind when a jolt like electricity hurtles through his arms like snakes, the force of the spell like tentacles of green lightning throwing him back and skidding across the bridge and as he lies there stunned, Loki rises to his feet, prowling slowly toward him, magic crackling, blue and green at his fingers in dangerous sparks. A smile creeps across his face while the regret dances in his eyes, Thor thinking numbly, chaotically – _he looks so sad – such beautiful fingers – the magic dancing – _he remembers, as a child, watching the sparks flick and jump in Loki's hands, sputtering magic reflected in his wonder-struck eyes, Loki giggling and proud to amuse. He does not know now whether to reach for his hammer or to repeat his assertion, but Loki hears it echo in his eyes all the same –

_I will not fight you –_

"Intriguing –" Loki purrs, closing in – "How you still think you have a choice in this."

_x_

**So, I finally worked out where this was going and it surprised me – I'm really sorry for this but for once I'm not sure I can promise a happy ending. Anyone who spotted the spoiler may have guessed this. It's a long way off yet though so don't abandon me yet! **

**I'm surprised it took me this long to work it out – realistically and mythologically speaking there really is only one way this story can end *grim face* :-Z **

**On a lighter note: yes, Loki watches Jeremy Kyle, it's a weakness. :-)**


	11. Chapter 11

**11.**

Loki does not remember the time when they did not have to fight. He does not remember a time when he had a choice. He does not remember ever being given a choice. Does not remember a time Thor really looked at him like he cared. Does not remember all the times they played, laughed, fought together, ran like the wind on the back of a shared naughtiness, rode out from Asgard side by side, kissed, argued, loved. He does not remember fighting back to back, when the first instinct of both of their hearts was to keep the other safe from harm, when that instinct shone through even when the raging haze of battle fell across vision like a curtain. He certainly does not remember the thousand hissed and whispered promises they made in the heat that came after.

He is adamant he does not remember, _determined _to not remember.

He replaces it all with a new set of memories; a set he laid out for himself – oh it seems so long ago now, before Hel, before Asgard, before his efforts to rule Midgard – surely all of these events have taken centuries by now?

These new memories are clear in his mind, easier to conjure up than those other beautiful lies. Growing up in Thor's shadow, _being _that shadow, watching dispassionately, from every corner, watching angrily, watching jealously. Always watching. Always apart. Always _not as good as Thor. _Never as good as Thor. He remembers Thor always putting him down, hears the thousand times he was told to know his place, hears his own heart chime in bitter resentment storing it all up for the day he was ready. He remembers Thor's betrayal, remembers how he lied, remembers how quickly he threw him aside for the mortal girl. He remembers falling from the Bifrost. Oh he remembers that most of all, better yet he remembers Thor _throwing_ him from the bridge, letting him fall and smiling as he fell. Yes, he _will _remember this. This is how it was.

_Oh my love – _he whispers to himself inside - for no-one else has ever called him such a thing – _oh my love, how I love to hear you lie._

Satisfying memories, making sense of his actions now, Thor spinning across the bridge in the grip of a firestorm of magic, Loki grinning at the justness of it all. Madness in that smile and he feels it too – madness like an insect twitching in the corner of his eye, calling so many of those terrible false memories into his mind's eye with all the force of visual revelation – two boys playing together as equals on a golden afternoon in the woods, the awkward laughter behind those first tentative kisses, the heady roar and joy of battle, soft fur and firelight on the skin _I love you brother, I'll always love you – _lies, such damned stinking lies they make him want to scream. He pushes this madness aside and wraps Thor up in the twisting vines of static, watches him writhe like a fly in his trap, Thor making no move to fight back, even to protect himself, his face simply beseeching through the gutting lines of dazzling green and slashing blue. He gets out words in laboured breaths, shouting them above the sound and the fury –

_Loki no!_

_Loki you don't have to do this!_

_There's a choice, Loki, there's always a choice._

Worst of all, the ever ready –

_I love you brother, I love you –_

Until he almost hears himself scream above the crackling crash of the magical storm, for it is torture, horrible to hear – how Thor's words so collide with the false memories that whisper their poison into his ears. He shrieks his denial back over the storm, pouring a million little spiders of light from his fingers onto Thor's skin, little electric spiders crawling into his ears and mouth and eyes, sharp and wriggling and awful until Thor cannot bear it – until he has no choice himself but for draw upon Mjolnir and bring down the lightning, directing it straight through Loki where he stands, shaking him and breaking his concentration, making the spiders go away and all the sizzling magic trying to bind him. Loki fights it off, shrugs off the lightning and whips back round to Thor who has moved slowly, heavily to his feet, a stream of poisonous green light rushing from Loki's hands to push him back down, Mjolnir swooping round in Thor's hands to direct the lightning back to meet the path of the green, the forces crashing in the middle in an explosion like fireworks. They both stand their ground for a few moments, but Thor's lightning is stronger, his stance more secure; moments of sweating, teeth clenching, and Loki loses his grip just for a moment.

The lightning throws him back, and, not expecting Loki's resistance to give way so suddenly, slams into him, hurling back with such force that for a sickening moment Thor thinks he has gone right over the bridge. He drops the storm and runs to where Loki is hanging –that dizzying feeling of deja vu – hanging by one hand off the edge of the Bifrost.

This is the nightmare, this is the dream Thor has had every night for over a year. Ever since the day Loki fell he has dreamt of this – has seen him fall a hundred times and has rescued him a hundred more. The dreams in which Loki fell have been a torment, the dreams of rescue worse – for from them he has woken up to the dull realisation that it did not happen that way. That he failed, and Loki as he had known him was lost forever.

He will not lose him this time.

"Loki!" he yells – "Loki take my hand –"

Loki grins, his heart laughing in a terrible kind of madness – he _deserves _to fall – to fail again, _Thor _deserves for him to fall. He will, and damn them both. The abyss yawns, friendly like, beckoning him down. Thor sees his grip loosen, sees as if in slow motion Loki begin to let go again, and he will not have it. With a roar he surges forward, in a split second grabbing Loki by both wrists, Loki starting to twist and squirm as soon as he knows he has been caught.

"Let me go!" he yells – "Damn you Thor, let me fall!"

Thor realises what he is about to say a second before he says it, it is the last thing in the world he wants to say but it comes out of him before he can stop it –

"No, Loki".

Loki's eyes swimming darkly in the sky beneath them, stars shining in those liquid eyes, a glare of terrible hopelessness as he realises Thor is not going to let him destroy himself. He does not even struggle when Thor hauls him up with colossal effort, dragging him back up onto the bridge where he falls forward, gasping like an ensnared fish.

Thor drags him to him, holding him in a grip he will never ever let him out of, certainly not whilst they are still on this bridge. Tears are streaming from his eyes into Loki's hair and nothing, _nothing _will dampen the elation that surges in his heart, the sense that he has undone time, re – written this story. That his dream has had the good ending and this time when he wakes he can keep it, keep Loki. Keep him close to him forever as he should be.

His heart sings, happy and is not even crushed when Loki glares up at him, struggling through the vice-like hug to glare. Even his numb and bitter words cannot hurt –

"You should have let me fall."

_x_

**Well, that wound up melodramatic! Epic sceeeeenes! :-)**

**In really random news I have a baby golden-kneed tarantula called Loki and I just managed to epically piss him off – also by saving his life. He's in a way bigger sulk than a one inch creature should have any right to be in. I think I named him well. :-) **


	12. Chapter 12

**12.**

Thor pays Loki's comment no heed, this time picking him up firmly and, in spite of all his protests, carrying him staunchly away from the Bifrost and that lethally tempting edge. He does not put him down until he has marched him inside, upstairs, into his own chambers and locked the door. It is as though, suddenly Loki is a tiny child again and Thor has had to bodily haul him away from the scene of his mighty tantrum. When he does let go, he throws him down because he _is _angry-but it is onto a pile of furs in front of the empty fireplace, so soft that Loki all but bounces. He glares up at Thor furiously from this undignified landing but before he can even start Thor gets in there first, not willing to hear another ridiculous word pass from those lying, delicious and deceitful lips –

"Are you crazy? What in all the realms is _wrong _with you?"

Loki bursts into laughter, furious and bitter, staring up at Thor, eyes wide and dark and screeching;

"What's wrong with _me? _What's. Wrong. With. Me?" he shakes his head, unable to express it, silver tongue truly tangled in upon itself, knotted up in the threads of thought that all cluster in his mouth, acrid and bitter, sticky as tar. How he deserved to fall. How much better it would be for them all if he did. How it is only ever Thor, relentless, stupid Thor, who insists on pulling him back from the brink he so loves to hang upon. How for all this it is surely Thor is the one of the one who is insane, not he for all the whirring and the bees inside his brain. How small minded the idiot is to think only of him, always only of Loki as though the little boy who came to him with his night terrors still exists. As though there is good in him. As though he is not the one it is foretold will bring about the end of all things. For it is coming now, it has been said, and surely he has felt it upon the winds of change this long while now: Ragnarok. And soon. It is no longer a legend thousands of years in waiting, something for the long distant future. It is something they will both see before the end of their lives are due. It will be the end of their lives and it will be sooner than they knew. And he, Loki, he that Thor so hopes to save, he will be paramount in bringing it down. He has always wondered. He is almost honoured. The end of everything; he is sickened, terrified, buzzing with excitement and his own importance. He suddenly wishes to run from himself as the most loathsome thing imaginable.

He does not want to end the world. He does not want to see that ending come to be. He wants terribly to be important enough to end the world. He wants to see it and live through it. He is excited to see it, to see the stars wink out and feel the breath of the void, to smell the blood and the burning and the ice as it all goes down. He wants Thor to see how stupid this all is between them now, how petty even Asgard now appears. He hangs on the edge of spilling it all. He cannot even make out a word. Not exactly.

Thor watches the play of thought flash through Loki's wild eyes – that look like he is haunted by a ghost they have yet to meet. He knows there is something, something huge here Loki is not saying- he feels its breath down the back of his neck and shudders. But he forces it away and says, in more of a whisper than he meant to –

"What? Loki, what is it?"

And the fight goes out of Loki in a sigh. The excitement and the terror and the hate all melts away in Thor's honest fireside gaze, and there does not need to be a blaze in the hearth for Loki to feel the warmth. All he is left with is that need to be away from himself, to be lost, swallowed up, as everyone else will get to be soon enough whilst he has to play this major terrible part.

Just to lose himself. Finally he sees how Thor can help. Quick as a snake he whips an arm to lock around Thor's neck as he bends over him on the furs and a knife appears in his hand that Thor never sees until it is at his throat, the tip pushing into his skin almost but not quite enough to cut. Loki's arm drags Thor's face close to his, until he is no longer bent over him but crushed close against him, close enough to hear Loki's heart intent and primal as a drum beat.

"Kiss me," Loki hisses, harsh and snarling, lip twisting in feral want and bitter loathing, for Thor, for himself, for the whole stinking world that he hopes perhaps they can at least blow apart together.

Thor frowns; he does not understand the root of Loki's sudden need, this request when he was wanting only to fight him brief moments ago. He does not see that to Loki this is close enough to the same thing. He just sees the need and it fits too beautifully to what he has always wanted for him not to acquiesce. He bows his head.

Loki refuses to allow Thor to be gentle. He bites and growls into Thor's mouth, kissing to draw blood, frantic and furious. His nails dig into Thor's shoulder and the knife into his throat. Still Thor kisses back with love, however much he tries Loki cannot ignore it. He scratches and bites and hisses, and when Thor strokes his face tenderly in return he pushes him away and slaps him. Thor frowns;

"I thought it was what you wanted."

"Not if you're going to be a cunt about it," Loki snaps.

Thor frowns harder, not sure how tenderness and affection can ever be described as _being a cunt. _But, he supposes, this is Loki after all.

"I love you," he replies, bewildered. Loki slaps him again;

"Shut up!"

"I do!" Thor glares at him, his fingers winding in Loki's hair, his body tense with love and want and need now that Loki has started this.

"You're like a broken fucking record" Loki spits – "_Fine –" _he lets go the knife and with a quick gesture Thor's clothes are off and he scratches, viciously and completely, both hands ripping up that golden muscled back – "_Love me. _Show me. Break me with it, rape me with it, love my lies. I'm yours. I've always been yours. Stop talking and _fuck _me."

Loki's words are so broke, disjointed and senseless that Thor cannot keep up to understand; he hears only _I'm yours _and forgets that Loki premised this with the promise to lie to him. But he takes him entirely into his arms, gathering up every inch of that body, Loki softening and melting into his arms like the softest, most gorgeous fabric, the feel of him heaven against Thor's skin. Thor's hands taking, claiming, replying in silence _yes you are mine, yes you have always been mine _while his lips trail kisses across Loki's body from hips to neck, across his face and in circles about the throat, twining them together like ribbons being braided into an intricate design, flowing and complete. When Thor presses his cock against his hip, gently, unarguably parting his legs in preparation Loki's body leans into him in a great sigh of surrender and he laughs inside to know that he can lie through every inch of skin all the way down to his bones.

He shudders in a bliss he convinces himself he is pretending, crowning it all as Thor sinks inside him, choosing that moment to whisper _I love you _into his brother's ear. The laughter he feels inside, feeding Thor every lie he most wants to hear, giving him everything he wants and meaning nothing of this surrender – the laughter falters and squirms beneath the inability to lie to himself quite as well as he thinks he can.

He says it again- _I love you, _says it over and over in a mantra of ecstasy, releasing the words, the very concept he has held back for so long until by the end he is not even certain whether or not he is really lying. He is not sure if he has lost himself or found it. He meant to aim for the first, to be so covered in Thor, so filled by him, overtaken by his love and lust that he could lose sight of himself entirely. Instead he suspects he has found something he did not know was there. Something that surprises him utterly, and is so unbearably true that he comes with Thor's name on his lips, and those terrible worlds spilling sobbing from his tongue; he comes crying from the truth that he has found.

Afterwards he does not want to go back to being himself, his eyes prick with tears to know that he must and when he kisses Thor tenderly, light as a butterfly's wing, his eyes prick and spill over a little for knowing what he will have to say. For knowing what Thor will ask and the part he has scripted for himself.

Sure enough Thor does ask, gently, half smiling in the knowledge of the truth –

"Did you mean what you said?" Loki knows what he means – _when you said you were mine, what you said in your silence, when you told me you loved me. _

Loki looks away, the lie sobbing on his tongue, his eyes stinging as though all the bees in his brain have pricked into them at once, reciting his line like a terribly tired actor –

"Not a word," he says flatly – "Not a single word." He forces himself to laugh like to dreadful ham that he is – "You didn't really fall for that, did you?"

Thor says nothing, but Loki, turning his back to him, feels no sadness in the way Thor holds him, does not even feel his smile falter and he lies there, nervous wondering why. He wonders if the idiot actually thinks now is the time he is lying, ridiculous as it may seem. Thor pulls his cloak over them both and says nothing more until Loki is almost asleep. When he does it is more startling than Loki could have imagined;

"I know you better than you think, Loki," he whispers, low into his ear. Loki wants to fight, to damn him, to object, but he cannot, not now, warm and sleepy and unbearably not in love. Instead another truth slips out of him, the truth that before had been so important it dashed everything else to dust and now seems like the most minor of details;

"I'm going to destroy the world," he murmurs sleepily – "Wanna help?"

_x_

**I am so sorry this has taken so long. I'm also sorry about like the end of the world and all. Yes, that is where this is going. I was contemplating writing a separate thing called "Ragnarok" but nope, this is how this has to end now in my head. **


	13. Chapter 13

**13.**

Thor wakes the next morning unsure whether he is surprised, or not even faintly surprised, to find Loki gone. He buries his head in the indent Loki's has left in the furs, and when he finally looks up again his face is damp without his quite realising how this came to be so. He remembers hunting these furs in another life. They were a gift Loki had demanded from him when his passion destroyed the lesser ones Loki already had, right here by the fire in his room. He remembers Loki's guileless smiles when he found the new ones heaped upon his bed, hears his smiling voice ring again in his ears, remembers the vibrant touch and the taste of him as they came so close to destroying the new ones just as they had the first.

He feels sick to dying from living in the past. There is no longer anywhere else he wishes to live. He wonders if that was it, if it was all for nothing his waiting, his mourning, the journey to Hel and back for all that he wanted, all that he clung to so fiercely through the night has vanished like a dream in the first light of morning. He wishes now that he had done more, tried harder, that he had tried to talk to Loki every time he woke in the night, wriggling against him, frantic and scrabbling at him to fuck him _again _over and over as the night went on, in bursts of sleep and desperate sex. He wishes he could have achieved more, said even a fraction of the things he wanted and needed to say. But he had not. He had turned back time for one night only, rescued Loki from falling only to lose him all over again when the night's wild dreaming was over.

It is with surprise, lying in the furs, that he realises – if only after some time – that he is _not _defeated, not plunged right back into the distress that Loki's absence to supposed death had thrown him. No, he never got to talk to him, never got to persuade him to stay, to make things what they were again but he realises now it was a foolish dream, a child's imagining of a future that cannot possibly be. His dreams have always been so. He realises this now and knows too that Loki has always known what it has taken him so long to work out. It is not a tragedy this realisation, it is simply an end to an innocence he has held onto for too long.

He rises and dresses in the cold morning light with a new sense of purpose; a fatal one perhaps, but it is purpose nonetheless. He has succeeded in much and failed just as much. He never got to say all he should have said, never got to fix them beyond the mad crash of their bodies slamming back together once more, that mad frenzied scramble in which they had been engaged, it seems now, for their entire lives – as though they were one thing that got broken, always trying to crush itself back together. He knew now that they could never be fixed, not in this life, but after last night he knew too that they could never be eternally separated. Day and night had to meet briefly in the first morning's light and the end of the day. And so he would weather his days and sleep his nights and wait for those times when they could both hang briefly in one sky.

As he gets up and moves from his room he thinks about the last thing he remembers Loki saying, the sleepy announcement of forthcoming apocalypse. He had thought, at the time, that it was a vague and general statement, a joke even. It occurs to him now that it was not. He _knows _it, without question. Loki's actions have set him on the path to Ragnarok. Loki must have found this out before they were cast out of Hel.

He knows this because Loki knows this.

It is as though a door has opened in his head that has always been there but always been closed. Not a door through which he can hear Loki's thoughts as such, but one from which he can share in his knowledge. He wonders what part he has to play in the events that will unfold and wishes that he could help Loki play his. He realises now that in that playful question Loki had been asking for his help in the only way he could – in confidence that Thor would not be able to give it.

And he cannot. He knows that. He could not end the world he loves, _any _of the worlds he loves, not even for Loki. He wishes Loki did not have to, but suspects that he feels there is little choice, that he has not even made a conscious decision towards destruction so much as he is a link in chain being dragged in destruction's wake, cities falling like dominoes behind him.

So it is, as it was before, that Thor's feet lead him where they will. His mind is so otherwise occupied. Now, for the first time they lead him to the chambers of the All –Father where the King lies dead. He is not surprised to find him so; he supposes he knew he would find him like this and knows too how recent the passing is.

He knows because Loki knows. Because Loki wanted him to know. Because Loki made it happen. He knows how Loki crept from his room while he slept, slipping quiet as a snake to these rooms to effect their father's transition from sleep to death. He knows that it happened because Loki wished it to happen and, with the weight of cosmic intent hung about him like a cloak, his wish was enough to make it so. He realises there was never any part for their father in the chaos to come and he accepts this heavily, wondering if Loki meant it as the act of kindness it could well turn out to be. He wonders if Loki really _meant _anything at all. He sighs deeply in near silent acceptance of the crown that now settles upon him, the crown he had always wished to refuse.

"Loki," he whispers, offering it up from his heart to echo in these hollow chambers.

"You really do need to be led every step of the way don't you?" comes a voice right behind him. He turns around fast as a wind and his cloak whips through the image of Loki behind him which ripples like water disturbed and then settles.

"Yes, I knew you'd come here," it says – "I could see your every move as plainly as you see me now. I even programmed this to start when you said my name out loud. Yes this is a transmission – I'm sure you've noticed by now that I've gone –"

"Loki what –"

"Don't bother trying to talk to me Thor – yes I know you are but you see – I'm. Not. Here. I'm just an echo – a recording if you like, I'm sure that's how your precious Midgardians would put it. By now I'll be too far away for you to catch up with me in a day. There are other ways out of Asgard, there are _infinite _ways in and out. Oh you'll catch up to me eventually, I know you, and when you do I'll let you. Or maybe it will be the other way round. But I couldn't stay and listen to you spend the rest of eternity telling me how we can be just as we were. Because we _can't – _you do know that don't you? I wish –"

The reflection, image, projection –whatever it is – pauses, look downwards, it is so life–like Thor can actually see it swallow hard, see the lost, dark look in the eyes;

"It doesn't matter. I meant it about destroying the world. Don't argue; that's just the way it has to be. Hopefully you know that too now. I opened your brain a little while you slept so I can get in more easily. But it only goes one way – don't think you can get to me if you think hard enough."

It pauses, looking for all the world like it is frowning at him thoughtfully, head to one side like a bird, like Loki – so very like Loki. Thor only wishes he could touch –

"Don't frown like that, it makes you look like a pig. Of course, it's possible I'm lying. Thor –" Loki's voice becomes serious again – "Thor I know you'll follow me. You'll probably waste the rest of your life on it. I can't tell you not to but I can say – I didn't mean it – I'm glad you didn't let me fall. The world _will _end, and I'm going to have to have something to do with that – but I have a feeling – that's it's going to be alright. We'll fight and I'll run. You'll chase me and I'll fall - again and again – and sometimes you'll catch me and sometimes you won't and either way that's alright. It's all alright brother –"

And maybe it's just a shiver or a blip in the recording but Thor could swear there are tears, shimmering rainbow droplets in the corners of Loki's eyes –

"It'll all be alright, big brother. You're my friend and my enemy, brother and everything else. We'll fight and we'll fuck and I think at the end of all of this that we'll die but never doubt that I love you."

Thor's eyes sting to hear this and it is no blip now to see that Loki is crying a river, uncontrolled and silent. And then – it is so sudden Thor suspects that Loki paused for a while and re–started – he grins, shrugs and turns around –

"Now come and get me, brother".

Thor wants to yell, though it is with the same frustrated fury that Loki aroused in him when he tricked him as a child and he reaches to grab the image, his hands falling through it like air just as it goes out, quicker than a candle. Just for a moment he can see the colours that are Loki reflected across his skin before he is left clutching at nothing.

Just for a second Loki switches back on before disappearing, this time for good –

"You just had to, didn't you," the image grins and shakes its head.

And Loki is gone again.

_x_

**Confession: I have been reading "Fight Club" and it's highly possible this is why ****_Thor knows stuff because Loki knows stuff _****however – (plot twist!) – they're not actually gonna turn out to be the same person. Just in case anyone wondered!**

**Also I made myself cry with this chapter. :-(**


	14. Chapter 14

**14.**

It is a year before he sees Loki again.

It is a year to the day because Loki has the most unendurable tendency towards dramatic flair. Because he wants to tell a good story. Because it sounds good. Whatever. It is a year to the day because Loki wants it to be.

"Three intensely stupid questions," Loki says, before Thor has even said a word to him –

"Three stupid questions, and I'm gone on the third."

They are stood on the edge of a battlefield. This is how Thor has been searching; following him throughout the realms, following the trail of damage and carnage, bloodshed and chaos. For the worlds are descending, it is easy to see. On Midgard, talk about the end of days has ceased to be the eye rolling, predictable nothing it has always been, fire and flood – it's not a joke anymore; humanity is suffering and there's nothing Thor can do.

But it is not just humanity; everywhere he goes, throughout all the nine realms, the signs of disintegration are growing. It is not just Loki, he knows that, it is too big to just be Loki. But he knows which battles have Loki's name on them, which razed homesteads have his after-image dancing in the fires of what used to be a thousand homes.

In an abandoned palace in Vanaheim he actually finds a note from Loki pinned onto the throne of a dead king. It is over half a year since he has seen him and the note tells him nothing.

_Happy hunting brother, you just missed me _– it says, and nothing else.

Or nearly nothing else. On the back of the night, impossibly amidst the grimness and the death it reads –

_Kisses, Loki, xxx_

His eyes becoming immune to the dead and the half-eaten by monsters, strewn across the great hall, he looks at these nine words until they grow sore.

Everywhere he goes he stops to offer help where he can, though there is rarely much help to be given. His father's ravens that now follow him everywhere do more help in cleaning up carcasses than much that he can offer to the living. The sense of uselessness plagues him only when he stops to think how long it has been and he has still not caught up to his brother. He wonders if, in his inability to help, he really is helping Loki in whatever "Plan" he has to destroy the world.

As time goes on the calls from his acquaintances on Midgard grow increasingly desperate. He joins up with them when he can – he knows it is not as often as it should be – and he still feels a little like this takes him from his main purpose.

He is no longer even certain what that is. He lies to himself for as long as he can that he means to stop Loki, but the more he sees the more he realises how little good that would do. It is not Loki. Not really. In truth he simply knows the end is coming and he wishes to face it with only one other by his side.

The others don't believe in the end of the world. They are heroes after all, and heroes means they don't just lie down and accept these things. Heroes means they go down fighting; Natasha reminds him of this so grimly he wonders if she does not perhaps see what is coming at least a little after all. One day, separate from the others, Steve calls him out on his negativity, reminds him how he used to be the one who kept them all smiling.

"I guess I did," he says and though he did not mean the hopelessness he feels to be quite so apparent in his voice, he sees the unwavering hope flicker so badly for a moment in the Captain's eyes that he does not go back to earth again. He stops answering their calls, throws out his phone and suspects this really will be entirely for the best.

_x_

Now he stands facing Loki in the charred soil beside a burning copse, smoke billowing black and grey across the sky from the remains of a neighbouring village. He stands frowning;

"What?"

"First question. Look I know you want to give me all the _why _and the _how _and the _what for _but just answer _me_ one thing first."

Thor makes a grunting sound, unwilling to accidentally let a question slip, should Loki be true to his word on this. Loki smiles winningly –

"Did you miss me?"

Loki has hardly changed, Thor notices, from the day they returned from Hel. His eyes never leave Thor's face and it is like being stared at by a snake, he is the one perfect thing in the desolation of the worlds. A pale, shining thing, striding, emerald and onyx down the smoking road that leads to Ragnarok. He should kill him, slow down the suffering of all the nine realms.

The hammer falls from his hand. He half stomps, half falls the few steps to seize Loki, almost crushing him into his arms in reply. Loki allows it and his arms twine sinuously around Thor's neck in return, the little face pressed into his shoulder. He can hear his little brother's heart fluttering wildly against his chest and he squeezes him as though he will never let go. Before he knows it Loki is kissing him like he has starved for this more than he has. Before he knows it he is kissing him back.

Before either of them know it they have fallen here, on the edge of the battlefield, a sweaty, tangled pile of limbs, inseparable as an impossible knot.

Fucking on the road to Ragnarok should not be such a priority at this juncture.

It really is the most incredible priority.

Afterwards they walk up through the village, hand in hand, innocent in the wreckage as young lovers on some starry night. They discuss the upcoming End of All Things as though they were children again planning a play hunt in the woods.

"What have you been doing?" Thor asks.

"Killing things," Loki replies too promptly, then he sighs – "Well not really. Just getting people to kill each other. It's terribly easy when you know how."

"Why?" Thor asks, surprised to find he still has it in him to be a little appalled.

"That's your second stupid question." Loki sighs – "Do stop. Because I have to. Next."

Thor shakes his head.

"I don't want you to go."

"I don't –" Loki thinks about what he wants to say and says something he would rather not all the same – "I don't want to." Thor frowns, Loki carries on before he can speak -

"But I have to –" he shrugs – "I have to," he echoes looking down.

"I missed you," Thor squeezes his hand. Loki squeezes back. It gives him hope again for the first time in a year.

"I wish –" he adds, but Loki drops his hand and rounds on him fiercely;

"Don't," he almost shouts, then shakes his head and sighs heavily – "Gods – just – just don't."

He kisses Thor again and again they fall, this time onto a not quite broken bed in a not entirely ruined house. Thor repeats the same phrases until Loki becomes almost irate – _I love you, I want you, I need you, I love you, I love you, I love you –_

"Norns – shut up – I'll go!"

"Statements," Thor justifies, smiling, as he pushes Loki's wrists back into the pillow – "Not questions."

He makes it through three nights, only surviving he suspects because Loki labels all his questions merely _stupid _and not _intensely stupid. _He cannot help but wonder if Loki was just using the questions thing as an excuse and knew exactly how long he wanted Thor around all along.

On the morning after the third night they lie beneath their half a roof, sunlight pouring in through a broken wall, almost at peace, almost smiling. Then Thor goes and asks Loki why they can't just stay this way.

Loki's eyes fill with tears and he looks at Thor silent and furious. His lips twist ruefully and he sits up, instantly dressed.

"That's the third," he says leadenly.

"Don't you have to answer it?"

"I never said that. I just said –" Loki looks at him, face trammelled with silent silver tracks of sun – washed tears. He runs a hand through Thor's hair, tender as a gasping breath. It feels to Loki like grasping for the last sunlight he will feel in a long time.

"Goodbye Thor," he whispers, and even quieter still – "I'm sorry".

Thor sits alone in his wake, wondering how Loki can cry more and leave him than he who is left behind.

He curls back into bed for most of the rest of that morning, breathing Loki's scent from the pillow beside him until he imagines he must have inhaled it all. When he hugs the pillow to him, trying to crush out the last of that musky, leafy scent he notices another of those increasingly familiar notes lying folded on the bed. He drops the pillow and reads it in a joy so great he finally cries for it –

_I'll be with you when it all comes down._

He reads, and Loki's rune signature below it.

He knows that, even if it is years this time, before they meet again, it will be easier to bear in the light of this assurance, than it was this one year without it.

_x_

**Now I have that Beegees song "Tragedy" in my head.:-(**


	15. Chapter 15

**Warning: This chapter is probably the most tragic thing I've ever written, covering the deaths of several of the avengers. It's not really connected to the main plot so you can skip it if that's unendurable and you won't have missed anything. Also there's no Loki in this section so you can easily pick up the next chapter if you ****_do _****skip it!**

**15.**

It is not until the autumn of nearly nine years later that he returns to Midgard. Or what is left of it. Waters came and they drowned much of the land, leaving just a series of islands where the continents used to be. Giant lizards came up out of the water to reclaim what little was left for themselves. Here and there pockets of humanity survived, as humanity always did, on the highest land masses that still came up above water level and the boats that had turned into floating islands that had turned into almost cities.

The floating city of New York had been built on top of the dead, the bodies that had piled so high they could be used as ballast to keep the living alive in a whole new town, a town consisting of army bases, twisting streets, surreal parks and places of beauty that looked grotesque amongst the concrete and mass graveyards.

"You get used to it," Natasha says, as he meets her at the City Central Cemetery gates – "After a while. If you're – I don't know –" she shrugs, her eyes are distant these days, lost and permanently narrowed – "Me."

He pats her awkwardly on the shoulder; it is so awkward, so body – jolting that for a moment she almost smiles. She gestures through the gates and Thor follows her finger down a row of headstones to where Steve is bent over, on one knee before a small army marker.

Thor kneels beside him in silence for a moment, following his eyes to the small white cross. In the absence of materials, grave markers are small; this one can take no more than the initials - _JBB _and this year's date. After what seems like the longest pause Thor tries to find something to say. He does worse than he expected –

"I am sorry about your friend."

Finally Steve turns to look at him, and he notices, firstly, that he has been crying – one whom Thor has never seen cry, second that he is, as he has rarely seen him, out of the costume and that there is a silver star on a ripped piece of blue fabric placed reverently at the foot of the grave in front of them.

Steve looks at Thor and his look is so strange that Thor frowns –

"This _was_ a friend of yours?"

"A – " The Captain's mouth moves as though he has forgotten how to talk – "An everything," he says finally, face, eyes, voice, hollow and far away.

"How?" Thor asks, not that he really wants to know, just knowing that his friend can be comforted by technicalities.

"Day before yesterday," Steve nods, straightening up as he speaks – "We were patrolling the eastern edge. Reports saying there'd been new hostiles sighted in the water. It's hard to tell how far the city's floated y'know? Well, hostile is right, thing was all heads and tentacles. He – he took it down." He shakes his head as though still unable to quite believe this – "I told him not to try it, but –" he stands and sighs, eyes never quite leaving the grave – "Saved all of our lives, the idiot. All of us who are left."

"And –" It seems trivial but Thor suspects it means something more – "The costume?"

"I think now the time really is past."

Thor wonders why none of them are angry with him, wonders if he could have stopped this, wonders what hope is left for any of them, wants to find a good way of asking exactly who is left. As if reading his thoughts Steve goes on –

"It's just me. Me and Nat. And Hulk. Banner's gone, he's not coming back. Fury, two years back. Clint – just last year, him and Falcon, out on a mission – never came back. Tony – he couldn't deal after Pepper – plus side is he took most of the monsters with him – until these new ones start showing up."

"I am sorry." Thor wishes there were something better he could say. He can see that Steve means it when he tells him he does not have to be, but it does not make him feel better.

"And you won't be staying," Steve says, not a question, no resentment, the same echo of apocalyptic destiny he saw in Natasha's eyes.

"For a while," he nods – "I'll help, if I can."

Steve nods;

"It's just that one person, am I right? The one that keep you going, keeps you alive not just surviving. The one. I get it. He still alive?"

Thor nods, he thinks so anyway. He feels guilty all the way down to his toes for knowing his _one _is in part responsible for his remaining friends having lost theirs.

"Stay as long as you like. Guess we could use the help. Nat says it's The End. Soon. She right?"

Thor nods. Steve touches the top of the grave marker tenderly and nods an unspoken _good _that even Natasha can hear from across the graveyard.

"We're gonna stay around for it. Meet it. Go out fighting. Like Bucky, like Clint. But you –"

Steve takes his arm, looks up at him intently – "You find him, you hear me? Tell him _everything. _Everything you gotta say. Cause if you don't get the chance –"

He sighs, shakes his head and looks down.

"And you?" Thor says gently – "What would you say?"

Steve nods, ready, the words that have been choking in his throat these last two days falling out as though he has just been waiting for someone to ask;

"I'd say end of the line, baby, and I'm still with you."

Natasha has come closer in the last few minutes and Thor hears her stifle a sob, the heroes hug in a crush in the grave yard and Thor goes, knowing he will not see them again.

_x_

**Okay so I did that. Didn't really know I was gonna, but it occurred to me it would be rude to write Ragnarok without covering the deaths of Earth's greatest heroes. I am actually a huge fan of Steve/ Bucky and promise to write something happy for it one day to make up for this. A thousand apologies. Sorry. So sorry.**


	16. Chapter 16

**16.**

In the end of course, it all comes back to Loki. Thor cannot stop too long in any one smoking wreck of a place for having to carry on in his quest to find him again. He has lost sight of the good it could do, suspects that there is no more good he could do in all the realms. But good does not matter anymore – good or bad, it becomes irrelevant beneath the crashing waves of destruction that are tearing apart the worlds. Still he feels the wavering balance of his walk these days, shaking across the line between mediocrity and evil.

Because he lost the chance to be good when he left earth; he realises it now. Useless though it would have been, that last chance to die a hero left him when he left the last of his friends. Leave it to Natasha to take that final spot, to end her life in an unparalleled goodness she could never have foreseen for herself. Leave it to the kid from Brooklyn who has lost his way in the many shadows that have fallen, who will no more trust to his own goodness for believing every last potential for beauty has gone with James Buchanan Barnes.

Their names ring out across the widening wastes of creation as one final call to all that should not be forgotten; Tony Stark, Bruce Banner, Clint Barton, Nick Fury, Sam Wilson, Bucky Barnes…..the list goes on, a roll call of the dead that should never have been heard in our time. Only so long before the last of them join it; Steve Rogers, Natasha Romanov. But not Thor. Not for him the honour list of heroes, not anymore. He is surprised he can still even wield Mjolnir, he has fallen so far from grace.

He loses his balance on a cold day in summer; all the days are cold now, for the sun is in hiding, cringing from the wolf that seeks to swallow it down. On the outskirts of a place where a town used to stand, he hears one of the last mobs of angry, desperate people shouting and throwing rocks. The more things change, he thinks, the more they barely alter. He supposes if the last thing he can do is save some poor bastard from a stoning then he had better do it. He sends thunder hurtling through the sky, lightning dancing around the angry, almost feral crowd, scattering them apart in a screaming crumbling mess.

As soon as his path is clear and he makes his way to the small crumpled figure on the ground he realises he has been wrong. Naively and idiotically wrong. He has not been a hero, even in this; he has instead stopped these desperate people taking out the only revenge they could on the creature that destroyed their home. And yet he cannot be sorry, even if this means he is himself a villain now for siding where he has. For the crumpled creature that looks at him tiredly through squinting eyes is Loki.

Lying beneath the rubble of the last house to fall Loki looks up at him, cracking a smile through bleeding lips;

"Long time no see, eh brother?" he croaks. Thor says next to nothing, does not ask him what he did here or why, offers no admonishment or sympathy, simply sighs –

"Oh Loki," as he gently picks him out of the rock and debris as tenderly as he would a trapped animal. As he cradles Loki's head in his hands, his fingers brush the fragile neck and he is hit by a memory as strongly as though Loki had sent it straight into his head (he has after all) –

_He is barely more than a boy and it has been his first successful hunt. Successful but for the fact that this first kill has not gone as smoothly as it ought. As he kneels down to snap the neck of the dying deer he looks up to see his little brother, a child still, sobbing silent and uncontrollable. It makes him pause but Loki shakes his head through the tears, shakes his head so fiercely that it dashes tears across Thor's face. He does not want to see this happen – he knows he will make himself see it happen but he wants less for Thor to drag it out and stop to look at him in such concern as he is now._

_"__Thor don't wait - just –_

- do it" Loki says there, in the same memory and he is inside his head and does not need to speak really, to make his meaning known. But Thor lifts his fingers from Loki's throat and swings him up bodily into his arms.

"No," he replies, with such an absence of kindness that Loki's eyes well up all over again –

"Never, Loki."

"No –" Loki sighs, and his understanding is so strong it is not as sad as it might have been – "No, I did not suppose you would."

And he sinks in a deep faint into Thor's arms.

_x_

Asgard.

It has been so long. Thor is overcome with a feeling of surrealism to see it still standing, still intact, when there is no longer any other realm than Hel's that is still in such a state. He has followed Loki for so long now that there are few of the one-time secret ways in and out that he does not also know. He stumbles out, with Loki still in his arms to find, stranger than all, Heimdall stood in front of him as though he has been waiting.

"The Bifrost flew apart near the beginning of this end," he explains in answer to Thor's query – "But bits of it remain in these hidden pathways. I will perform my duties as closely as I can with what little still remains."

"You make no move to stop us?" Thor frowns, amazed.

"I make no move to change what has to be," Heimdall replies – "Now more than ever. It is my fate not to provoke change as it is yours and his to bring it about."

"You do not blame me then, for saving him?"

"How can I blame a man for breathing?"

Heimdall says nothing else and it occurs to Thor how petty his questions must have sounded given the circumstances.

_x_

Loki sleeps for nearly twenty hours and in all that time Thor barely leaves his side. At first he worries about how still and how long Loki sleeps – until he stops to wonder how long it has been. He gets an answer back in his head as though Loki has read this thought –

_Months Thor, it's been months._

This strange telepathy; it has by turns kept him from going crazy and made him crazy in these past years since Loki began it. It is only ever when Loki wants it; and yet it has been something to cling to in all the time alone.

After this near communication Loki drifts away again and Thor simply watches him sleep and keeps the fire burning near them, for even the suns of Asgard are darkening. Loki, curled into his tight ball of sleep is so small, so sweet, he feels as he remembers from so long ago – wanting only to protect him, to gather every tiny bit of him into his arms and hold him there, safe and warm and his. He cannot think on it too long, it pains too much to think how badly he has failed.

And yet – Loki's face in sleep is so peaceful, tranquil as a small animal, with a innocence beyond even that of a child. He cannot imagine, however he supposes he should, that it does not point to some goodness inside that perhaps only he can see, has ever seen. When he turns in his sleep, muttering a tiny peeping sound, Thor strokes the soft head and wonders how much more the heart can ache.

_x_

When Loki next wakes he thinks at first that he is dreaming. He has had this dream so often, and in truth this is his room and Thor is sat beside his bed with a fire warm and friendly in the grate. Loki looks from place to place, smiles and then bursts into tears, but not for long. They are gone before he has even reached for Thor's hand and taken it in a crushing grip.

"For a moment I thought I had woken from a terrible dream. That everything was as it was when we were small." He says – "Then I heard the outer realms falling into chaos, I could feel the darkness sucking at the edges of reality. The wolves are coming soon now and there's a ship that waits for me on Midgard – I wish – I wish –"

"Loki –" Thor shakes his head, remembering the last time he said those two words and what Loki said to him – "Don't."

Loki draws a deep breath –

"And you," he sighs – "You had to save me again. What happened, Thor? When did you forget to be a hero? When did you decide you would let everything go away rather than just let me go? When did you decide you had to be the villain?"

"When did you?" Thor counters.

"Well we can't both be. Thor –"

"Loki do not ask me to kill you again. You know that I will not."

"You will fight me again before the end."

"Loki no –"

"You don't have to kill me," Loki sighs – "But you have to be the hero again, Thor."

"Why?"

"Because I have to be the villain. We may be gods, but even we cannot change fate. You have to be the other half of me."

"Why?" Thor asks again.

"_Thor –" _Loki smiles softly, reaching gentle brushing fingers up to his face – "Because you always were my better half."

Thor's spare hand encircles the little wrist close to his face;

"I love you Loki."

Loki nods.

"And when you say that again and it is still true with everything finally all gone to prove it – I promise to believe you."

"You don't keep your promises."

"I will keep this one – if _you _promise to be my enemy again. Follow me to Midgard in a day or two and we'll fight our last battle."

"Loki –" Thor shakes his head – "I do not understand. This is the end of everything and you are playing it like a game."

"Well yes," Loki sits up in bed as he speaks, standing and dressing in less than the blink of an eye, until he stands smiling, staff in hand, as dazzling and fleeting as a kingfisher –

"And you must play with me like a good big brother, for I go now not to rule Midgard, but to destroy it for good. Goodbye."

Just a flash, a smile, the lingering idea of dazzle, and the kingfisher is gone.

_x_

**As with my other fics, sorry about the delay, been far from internet for a while! Now back with your regular dose of tragedy! :-)**

**One day soon I promise to write something happy again. **


	17. Chapter 17

**Ragnarok is well and truly upon us! If I still have any readers left on this be warned for Major Character death again this chapter. Well, more or less every chapter from here on, there's only a couple to go now.**

**17.**

On the last rock of the earth in the last ocean not quite yet frozen they fight for the last time. The earth is falling down the throat of the wolf and the icy breathe has covered the seas, even with the last waves dashing hard upon this frozen mountain the last of the ice is rushing in to seal up the seas forever.

Down on the shore the last of the humans wait for that final icy wave to crash upon them. They are an old race, these humans, and they have always known about Ragnarok's coming. At their head, protecting them to the end, is the boy from Brooklyn, a boy with a fear in his eyes that his face has not seen since anyone can remember. The first of The Avengers is also the last. He knows it is a fight that he will never win, for at the very least he is fighting the sea itself. But it is more than just the sea - even if that were a fight that he could ever win. He knows that he cannot, but it is not in him not to fight – not in him to give up even if it seems the only choice.

Thor understands. He has always understood Steve better than he has any of the others. He has only ever been able to wish it was an understanding the captain could reciprocate. He wants to be Steve; to be able to end it like this, protecting this last hardy remnant of humanity.

But he is not alone upon this icy mountain top, and Loki is delighted at being able to stop him from joining these strugglers for the excuse it gives them to fight. Every time he attempts to break away he finds himself encased in a crackling, agonising storm of magical energy. He wonders if his attempts are as entirely noble as he wishes them to be, or there is not a part of him that does it just to allow Loki the battle he seems so desperately to crave. For all he goads Thor with the reminder that he has brought the earth to this point – he has not, not entirely, and they both know it.

And yet there is a ship of bone tossing on the waves out at sea. A ship with black sails that has heralded death wherever it glides. Loki's lips are scarred and trickling blood where he ripped the stiches away. Thor is torn in two wanting to kiss those tattered, twisted lips better and understanding that whoever did it did so in an attempt to slow the destruction of the world.

When Loki speaks, blood drips from his mouth, shocking red against the pale skin; where it drips to the snow at their feet something hisses and smells of poison. Still Thor looks only to his eyes and sees only the child he once was. The beautiful child he has always adored. He needs no more convincing, if it were ever needed, that there is nothing Loki can do that will make him stop loving him.

If it matters any more.

He knows he is not fighting as he should be. He falls and he falls and he knows that Loki could kill him at any time, at the very least could knock him out. Loki knows it too and it does not make his attacks any less painful, though he still does not take the kill he could so easily take. And Thor would let him. He knows it and it infuriates him. It takes Thor far too long to realise that Loki does not want to win. He never has. Every time they have fought since they were small Loki has always held back, he can see it all now as though it were his life passing before his eyes. He can see a hundred, a thousand fights that Loki has let himself lose, delighting more in Thor's victory than ever in the chance that he might beat him. All the times their fights turned into something else, Loki pinned beneath him looking up at him with black, lust blown eyes in which hung more satisfaction than he had ever seen him hold.

He remembers Loki on Earth from before – their prisoner and the only one there who was happy with where he was. He wonders if, even imprisoned back on Asgard Loki was not happier than when he had been trying to take over the earth. He realises – and it has taken him far too long – that this has been the only way Loki could ever bring himself to ask for what he wants. And yes, all he has ever wanted was to come home with him. To be back in Asgard, at his side and as his equal. He should have known it before.

Two things happen then at the same time. On the back of his understanding Thor slams Loki to the ground. On his back with his hammer resting once again on his chest, Thor determines that, even if it just for them to meet the end of creation together than this is how they will do it: back home again and as the equals they always should have been. At the same time a small tidal waves hits the beach, hits the mountain, sending icy spray all the way up to Thor's chest. It is all he can do not to get swept away by it himself. As the wave pulls back, leaving everything in its wake under a lethal frosting of ice Thor looks down, first at Loki, to check he is still lying there, incapacitated under Mjolnir, and then down at the beach. The beach has been swept clean of all its last stubborn creatures, the final humans swept out to sea as though they were shells on the beach, just one smashed and flailing creature left twitching on the ice. He glances quickly back at Loki and then swoops down onto the beach, a mighty thundering and cracking, shards of ice dashing out from all sides. He makes it to his friend just in time, if such it can be called. He raises the Captain's head to his lap but it does not take more than seconds to realise that he is broken beyond saving.

"So. This is it, huh?" he manages weakly – "The end?"

"I am sorry," Thor shakes his head, not sure what else to say. Steve frowns –

"For what?"

"I should have –"

"No." he cuts Thor off as firmly as he can – "We all do what we have to and you –" he draws in a struggling breath, death giving him awareness he never quite knew he had – "You get him home d'you hear? Just –"

"Yes?"

"Kill me okay?" He says it as though it is nothing and flaps a hand weakly at Thor's attempt to object – "I mean it. Don't let me freeze to death here. I'm not good with ice – don't wanna – don't wanna come back fifty years from now –"

All the times he has been asked this. All the times _Loki _has asked him this and it would have been unthinkable. He looks a silent question and the blue eyes answer back the firmest affirmative he has ever seen. He nods, the Captain mutters something, he thinks it is _end of the line _and knows it is not meant for him – and he snaps his neck with one mighty twist.

Then he turns, walks back up the beach, up the mountain, picks up his hammer and reaches out an arm to pull Loki to his feet. Loki looks at him, looks at the body, tiny down there on the beach, frowns –

"Humanity," he whispers in a tone of such respect Thor wonders if he is dreaming.

He knocks Loki out to take him home because he knows he will never come quietly.

_x_

**Halfway through this chapter I realised Thor was gonna have to kill Steve. I was not a happy girl but I'm too close to finished this to wimp out now. Hopefully there's a few of you left that are likewise! Also I figure I'm never writing a Major character death fic again so I should get them all in here while I can!**


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